Kerouac, Jack

Maggie Cassidy

ISBN: 0233965289
London, England: Andre Deutsch, 1974. First British Hardcover Edition (Publisher's File Copy). Hardcover. "Maggie Cassidy is a haunting and tender recreation of (Jack) Kerouac's first love. Jack Duluoz is sixteen, at once gauche, passionate and football-crazy, and Maggie Cassidy is a sexually precocious high-school girl a year older than he...and although Jack is only too conscious of the problems caused by his extreme youth and inexperience, and her wayward sexuality is a source of constant pain for him, from this moment on Maggie Cassidy becomes the overriding passion of his life...Kerouac's love for Maggie (in real life Mary Carney) was to haunt him for the rest of his short life, becoming in his mind the symbol of unfulfilled dreams of happiness and domesticity...In evoking so movingly the heightened emotions of adolescence and his own awakening sexuality, Kerouac once again defines the experiences of a whole generation." (from front flap) After the success of On the Road in 1957, myriad publishers scrambled to add a Kerouac title to their catalogs. As a result, the mass of works that Kerouac had literally been carrying around in his rucksack for almost an entire decade were brought to light (albeit in "castrated" forms, to use his description of On the Road's first publication). Maggie Cassidy, originally written during 1953, was one of those books, & is an essential work for any reader who wants to truly understand the changing tone & trajectory of Kerouac's literary aims and novelistic imagination. As with all his works, this is a fictionalized memoir, in this case of his teenage years in Lowell, Massachusetts, & his first adolescent crush. Offered here is the First British Hardcover edition, which happens to be the first (& as far as we know only) hardcover edition of all, published five years after Kerouac's death & fifteen years since its first rushed, sensationalistic publication as a softcover original (Charters, A7(c), pg. 30). Hardcover in unclipped dust jacket, first edition, Publisher's File Copy as stamped on blank front endpaper. A beautiful production, & an especially rare collectible in the Kerouac canon. Book in very fine condition with only very slight wear & fading to edges & corners of front, back covers & spine; light rubbing & sparse spotting to edges of text block esp. upper edge. Interior very fine with publisher's stamp (which states "Andre Deutsch/ File Copy/ Do Not Remove") & "Publisher's/ File Copy" written below in pencil on blank front endpaper; otherwise un-amended & substantially mint. Dust jacket very fine with only very mild rubbing to front, back covers & spine; a bit of wear & a few tiny bumps, creases at thin edges & corners of same & flaps. Very Fine / Very Fine. [Item #4057]

Price: $200.00