A pivotal and powerfully charged original letter from Jack Kerouac, written at the height of his early career struggles. Dated March 10, 1953, this typed correspondence is addressed to Allen Ginsberg, publisher A.A. Wyn of Ace Books, and concerns the imminent publication of William S. Burroughs' first novel, Junkie (published pseudonymously as "William Lee").
Kerouac writes with fierce literary principle and palpable anxiety for his own nascent career. He angrily rejects the publisher's attempt to use an anonymous quote from a "major novelist" (clearly himself) as a blurb, seeing it as a "transparent" ploy to manufacture consensus. The core of the letter is his emphatic, final refusal to allow his name, his work, or his coined term "Beat Generation" to be used to market a book about heroin addiction.
This is not a dismissal of Burroughs' work—which he acknowledges has a "cold power"—but a stark matter of "legal and spiritual self-preservation." Kerouac reveals his profound fear that the controversial Junkie would be critically "juxtaposed" with his own long-awaited On the Road (still four years from publication at this time), a juxtaposition he believes would be "fatal." He pointedly notes the irony of Burroughs being shielded by a pseudonym while he, Kerouac, is asked to stand as an unprotected "banner-bearer."
The letter concludes with a definitive severing of direct communication on the matter, instructing all future contact to go through his agent at MCA, marking it "strictly business." This document captures a critical moment of fracture and self-definition within the Beat circle, illustrating Kerouac's desperate struggle to control his public identity and separate his spiritual quest from the darker realities of his friends' narratives. A remarkable artifact of literary history, friendship, betrayal, and the fraught commerce of avant-garde culture.