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. 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 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. Door Wide Open A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958 By Jack Kerouac Penguin Books Copyright © 2001 Jack Kerouac All right reserved. ISBN: 0141001879 Chapter One The night of our blind date in January 1957, Jack couldn'teven afford to buy me a cup of coffee?his last twenty hadvanished earlier that day when he'd bought a pack of cigarettes andreceived change for a five?so I treated him to a hot dog and bakedbeans at Howard Johnson's. Then he came home with me to myfirst apartment. As we headed uptown in the subway, we bothnoticed a catchy new advertising slogan, FLY NOW, PAY LATER,which I found quite relevant to the beginning of this love affair."You should call your novel that," Jack immediately suggested. (Heseemed to like the idea that I too was a writer, although he disapprovedof my admiration for Henry James.) We exchanged our firstkiss as soon as we were inside my apartment. "I don't like blondes,"Jack warned me, coming up for air, but I didn't take this as seriouslyas I should have.     I was living at the time in two furnished rooms on the groundfloor of a brownstone on 1l3th Street between Broadway andAmsterdam. The following morning I successfully executed abreakfast of bacon and eggs on the rickety two-burner stove in acorner of the living room?cooking was one of my recentlyacquired skills. Jack had spent his first years in New York living allover this Columbia University neighborhood where I'd grown up,walking these streets discussing Proust and Nietzsche and the"New Consciousness" with Lucien Carr, Allen Ginsberg, andWilliam Burroughs while I was still in pigtails.     Now that I was drawn into Jack's world, it became harder andharder to show up at the MCA Literary Agency each morning.Nights had become long and sleepless, full of hard-drinking peopleof his acquaintance. We often went downtown to visit LucienCarr, whom Jack considered his closest friend. They had met in1944, when Lucien was a freshman at Columbia; it was Lucien, infact, who had introduced him to Ginsberg and Burroughs. At nineteen,according to Jack, Lucien had looked like Rimbaud. But foryears he had hidden his beauty behind horn-rimmed glasses withclear lenses and a wispy mustache. In 1944 there had been an incidentthat would cast a shadow over the rest of his life. OnRiverside Drive, with his Boy Scout knife, Lucien had killed anolder man named David Kammerer, who had been obsessed withhim since his boyhood in Saint Louis and had followed him toColumbia. At Lucien's trial, prominent Columbia English professorshad testified as character witnesses, and he had been sent to areformatory for three years. In many ways, Lucien seemed more"settled" than Jack's other friends. He worked as a night editor forthe United Press and had an elegant, weary-looking wife namedCessa and two small boys, who were fascinat