The Town and the City.

KEROUAC, Jack.

$12,000.00

Item Number: 134655

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1950.

First edition of Kerouac’s first book. Octavo, original red cloth. Signed by Kerouac on the front free endpaper and with the ownership name of his close childhood friend and neighbor in Lowell, Massachusetts, Charles Dudevoir. With a note of provenance signed by Charles Dudevoir’s granddaughter which reads in part, “Phil – my mother lived in Lowell when she was young – Irene Dudevoir – Her dad, Charles + mother, Martha knew Keroauc… Thanks! Melinda” and a very detailed three-page typed letter of provenance which reads in part, “I bought this book from a very well known dealer out here in California in ’97. His name is Jerry Melon… The Kerouac is a very good signature from him as he frequently signed just ‘Jack’ or JK… there are a few formal copies of the ‘Town’ signed ‘John Kerouac’ but a full fledged Jack Kerouac on any book is very rare… I believe the [inset from the granddaughter of Charles Dudevoir] was written to Phil Chaput, a local Lowell dealer who handled many Kerouac estate items along with Jeffrey Weinberg of Waterrow books. Jeffrey Weinberg… in fact lived right across the street from the Kerouacs house and told me that Joe Dudevoir used to mow his lawn and Kerouac’s lawn. Charles died in the 1950s according to his daughter-in-law… if you look up the family name ‘Dudevoir’ on Yahoo people search, you’ll see the name appears locally all over the Lowell Mass area… and in few other places. I actually called a few Lowell Dudevoir phone numbers back in ’97 and reached an elderly woman who said Charles Dudevoir was her deceased father-in-law and that he had been a very well known and well liked town resident in Lowell. He sounded like one of the classic boisterous back slapping ‘Canuks’ that Kerouac wrote about in the book.” Very good in a very good dust jacket. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box made by the Harcourt Bindery. Rare and desirable signed ‘Jack Kerouac’ and with noted provenance from his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts.

Kerouac began writing The Town and the City in late 1945, according to Ellis Amburn, who edited Kerouac's last two novels and wrote the biography Subterranean Kerouac. Heavily influenced by Thomas Wolfe, he sent the completed manuscript to Wolfe's publisher, Charles Scribner's Sons, in 1948. Allen Ginsberg lobbied his former teacher at Columbia University (Kerouac had also attended Columbia), Mark Van Doren for help, and Van Doren set up an interview with Alfred Kazin, who worked as a scout for Harcourt Brace. Kerouac was unable to make the interview with Kazin but Ginsberg introduced Kerouac to New Yorker editor Ed Stringham, who arranged a meeting between Kerouac and the editor-in-chief of Viking Press. Kazin eventually decided to read the manuscript and if he liked it, he would pass it to the top publishers in New York. His contacts also included Houghton Mifflin, Alfred A. Knopf, Little Brown and Company, and Random House. Kazin recommended the book. In December 1948, Scribner's again rejected the manuscript, despite changes that Kerouac had made to the text. Little Brown also rejected the book that same month, declining publication due to its excessive length, which meant the book would be prohibitively expensive for a first novel. (Most of the costs of publishing a first novel are the costs of paper and binding, and a long book makes it harder for the publisher to recoup its costs.) After reading sample chapters of The Town and the City (along with Kerouac's work-in-progress Dr. Sax), Mark Van Doren recommended the novel to Robert Giroux at Harcourt Brace in March 1949. Giroux, like Van Doren and Kerouac, was associated with Columbia. Giroux was impressed with the 1,100-page-long manuscript, which he thought comparable to Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel in terms of its lyricism and poetry, and offered Kerouac a $1,000 advance against royalties. Publication eventually was pushed back to March 2, 1950. It received good notices from Charles Poore, reviewing the book for the daily New York Times, and John Brooks, reviewing it for the Sunday Times Book Review.