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Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958
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Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958 Paperback - 2001

by Jack Kerouac; Joyce Johnson; Introduction by Joyce Johnson

"Door Wide Open" is a moving collection of love letters between two major figures of the Beat generation. Reflecting upon these tumultuous years, Johnson seamlessly interweaves letters and commentary, making the story of her affair with Kerouac as compelling as an epistolary novel.


Summary

On a blind date in Greenwich Village set up by Allen Ginsberg, Joyce Johnson (then Joyce Glassman) met Jack Kerouac in January 1957, nine months before he became famous overnight with the publication of On the Road. She was an adventurous, independent-minded twenty-one-year-old; Kerouac was already running on empty at thirty-five. This unique book, containing the many letters the two of them wrote to each other, reveals a surprisingly tender side of Kerouac. It also shares the vivid and unusual perspective of what it meant to be young, Beat, and a woman in the Cold War fifties. Reflecting on those tumultuous years, Johnson seamlessly interweaves letters and commentary, bringing to life her love affair with one of American letters' most fascinating and enigmatic figures.

From the publisher

On a blind date in Greenwich Village set up by Allen Ginsberg, Joyce Johnson (then Joyce Glassman) met Jack Kerouac in January 1957, nine months before he became famous overnight with the publication of On the Road. She was an adventurous, independent-minded twenty-one-year-old; Kerouac was already running on empty at thirty-five. This unique book, containing the many letters the two of them wrote to each other, reveals a surprisingly tender side of Kerouac. It also shares the vivid and unusual perspective of what it meant to be young, Beat, and a woman in the Cold War fifties. Reflecting on those tumultuous years, Johnson seamlessly interweaves letters and commentary, bringing to life her love affair with one of American letters' most fascinating and enigmatic figures.

First line

THE NIGHT OF OUR BLIND DATE in January 1957, Jack couldn't even afford to buy me a cup of coffee-his last twenty had vanished earlier that day when he'd bought a pack of cigarettes and received change for a five-so I treated him to a hot dog and baked beans at Howard Johnson's.

Details

  • Title Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958
  • Author Jack Kerouac; Joyce Johnson; Introduction by Joyce Johnson
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition First Printing -
  • Pages 208
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Penguin Books, New York
  • Date June 1, 2001
  • Features Index
  • ISBN 9780141001876 / 0141001879
  • Weight 0.35 lbs (0.16 kg)
  • Dimensions 7.74 x 5.07 x 0.62 in (19.66 x 12.88 x 1.57 cm)
  • Ages 18 to UP years
  • Grade levels 13 - UP
  • Themes
    • Chronological Period: 20th Century
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 990053219
  • Dewey Decimal Code B

Media reviews

Wonderful...conveys Johnson's own growth as a woman and writer in the 1950s, absorbing Kerouac's remarkable freedom. —The New York Times Book Review

About the author

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the "Beat generation" and made Kerouac one of the most best-known writers of his time. Publication of many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur. Kerouac considered all of his autobiographical fiction to be part of "one vast book," The Duluoz Legend. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.
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by Kerouac, Jack; Johnson, Joyce

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