Desolation Angels.

KEROUAC, Jack.

Item Number: 117816

New York: Coward-McCann, 1965.

First edition of this classic autobiographical novel by Kerouac featuring “one of the most true, comic, and grizzly journeys in American literature” (Time). Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper in the year of publication, “For Dale Fredrickson and Donna April 16, ’65 St. Pete Jack Kerouac.” The recipients were friends of Kerouac’s in St. Petersburg, Florida where he lived. Very good in a very good dust jacket with light rubbing to the extremities. Jacket design by Sam Salant. Introduction by Seymour Krim. Signed and inscribed first editions of this classic are rare.

"Each book by Kerouac is unique, a telepathic discord. Such rich natural writing is nonpareil in later 20th century, a synthesis of Proust, Celine, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Genet, Thelonius Monk, Basho, Charlie Parker and Kerouac's own athletic sacred insight. Jack Kerouac was a 'writer' as his great peer William S. Burroughs says" (Allen Ginsberg). This autobiographical novel covers a key year in Jack Kerouac's life—the period that led up to the publication of On the Road in September of 1957. After spending two months in the summer of 1956 as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington, Kerouac's fictional self Jack Duluoz comes down from the isolated mountains to the wild excitement of the bars, jazz clubs, and parties of San Francisco, before traveling on to Mexico City, New York, Tangiers, Paris, and London. Duluoz attempts to extricate himself from the world but fails, for one must "live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry."