[Dear Carolyn, Letters to Carolyn Cassady] spans the decade from 1952 to 1962. The first letter, June 3, 1952, sings the praises of the cheap life in Mexico, and is loaded with amazing prices for luxuries like Filet Mignon and full of advice for Carolyn about her relationship with the man Kerouac helped make a legend…. The final letter is full of writing, his writing, Neal's writing, and laden with the disgust and discouragement that came of what he calls "being insulted by critics" and written off by his family. It contains the defiant bragadoccio with which he countered despair: "… I have written the greatest prose in America since Melville, and the greatest English prose since Joyce and William Shakespeare." In between these two samples are tucked as much gossip, as many of the details of this extraordinary and public affection, as much serious talk about writing and literature in America as one might hope for.
Kerouac reveals the worst of himself in his anti-semitic tirade against writers like Malamud and Roth, and the best in his clearly genuine affection for the Cassady children and a desire somehow to sort out the complexities of his relations with both Cassadys and make them all worthy and workable. Certainly Kerouac has earned a place in our literary history, and these letters help illuminate his life as a writer and his relationship to what became his most famous subject.
A review of "Dear Carolyn, Letters to Carolyn Cassady," in Small Press Review (© 1983 by Dustbooks), Vol. 15, No. 3, March, 1983, p. 8.
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