The Haunted Life: and Other Writings

Publisher Marketing: Jack Kerouac wrote "The Haunted Life" in 1944 when he was 22 years old and attending Columbia University. Originally intended as a three-part novel, only this first 20,000-word section was ever finished. Upon its completion, Kerouac promptly lost his only hand-written final draft in a New York taxi cab, remaining unknown to the public until its appearance at Christies about ten years ago. Kerouac s family has now decided to share this manuscript with the world. While the entirety of the novel remained unfinished, the surviving manuscript successfully works alone as a novella with a satisfying, if open-ended, conclusion. It features a scaled-down version of the Martin family and is set in Lowell, Massachusetts, as was Kerouac s first novel "The Town and The City." Kerouac had planned on writing a cycle of novels tentatively titled "An American Passed Here," which was to be set primarily in the fictional town of Galloway (based on Lowell). That cycle was to contain "The Haunted Life" and "The Sea is My Brother," tracing the story of the Martin family throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Eventually Kerouac s plans for his Martin cycle materialized into his first novel, "The Town and the City," shortly before he moved on to compose his iconic "On the Road." Todd Tietchen, the editor of the project and the Jack Kerouac/Beat Scholar in residence at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, has assembled a number of archival documents to thicken out the context of this lost novella, documents that attest to the level of intention and care that went into Kerouac s writing projects." Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 05/26/2014 (EAN 9781480583917, Compact Disc) Library Journal 05/01/2014 pg. 66 (EAN 9780306823046, Hardcover) Choice 10/01/2014 pg. 257 (EAN 9780306823046, Hardcover) Contributor Bio:  Kerouac, Jack Jack Kerouac was born in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts. The best-known of his many works, On the Road, published in 1957, was an international bestseller. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, at the age of forty-seven. Contributor Bio:  Daniels, Luke Luke Daniels has narrated over 250 audiobooks, has been the grateful recipient of thirteen "AudioFile" Earphones Awards, and has earned three Audie nominations. His work ranges from Kerouac to Updike, Nora Roberts to Ed McBain, Dean Koontz to Philip K. Dick.