This collaboration by legendary Beat writers Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs sat unpublished for over sixty years after being written.
Not to be unduly cruel, but if had failed to see print for a further six decades, the literary world would have been no poorer. The book was written over a decade before the two authors published anything, and a dispassionate observer will easily understand why it was rejected by publishers in 1945. Not because it is shocking or avante-garde, because it is neither, but because it really isn't very good.
Burroughs and Kerouac write (mostly) alternating first person chapters from two disparate but essentially similar viewpoints. The narrators are thinly disguised versions of themselves and all of the primary characters are based on their friends and associates at the time. The plot entails the pursuit of a young and sexually ambivalent man by his sometime mentor, older and openly homosexual, and is based on the real murder of Walter Kammerer by Lucien Carr in 1944.
Carr, then 19, stabbed the 33 year old Kammerer during a drunken quarrel then tied his arms together, weighted his pockets with rocks and rolled him into the Hudson river to drown. He admitted the killing to Kerouac, Burroughs and others before surrendering to the police. He was convicted of first degree manslaughter, served two years in prison, and on his release began working for United Press International, eventually becoming one of the most respected newsmen and editors of that organization. It was his death from natural causes that allowed the publication of the book by the Kerouac estate (Kerouac and Burroughs had promised Carr some time in the sixties that they wouldn't attempt to publish it until his death)
The book had acquired something of a legendary status before its publication, primarily because the two authors talked about it frequently, and it was assumed that any collaboration between two innovative and influential literary stylists at the beginning of their careers would be something special. Unfortunately, its not. This has nothing of Burroughs wonderful manipulation of the language that we see in "Junky" or "Naked Lunch" and while Kerouac's sections are a little more familiar to those who have read "Desolation Angels" or "The Dharma Bums" they are lacking the fullness that his later work acquires.
This is worth reading for its literary historical import, which frankly is somewhat slight, but not for much else.
