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

by Jack Kerouac (Author), Joyce Johnson (Author), Joyce Johnson (Introduction by)

A "wonderful" (The New York Times Book Review) and unique collection of love letters between Joyce Johnson and Jack Kerouac

"A touching commentary not only on the Beat Generation but on what it's like to be a young woman who loves a gifted, troubled guy with other things--besides love--on his mind."--Elle

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.

Door Wide Open, containing the many letters the two of them wrote to each other, reveals a surprisingly tender side of Kerouac. It also shares a vivid and unusual perspective on 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 literature's most fascinating and enigmatic figures.

Author Biography

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.