Kerouac the novelist and hyped-up biographical writer appears to have faded, but there is a definite awakening of interest in the Beat milieu which he represented so vocally. These letters are genuine source material for anybody interested in that age and taste, and the early ones show that. Kerouac from his early twenties was serious and self-questioning, taking his vocation as a writer in deadly earnest.
His correspondents include fellow-writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Alfred Kazin, and he also writes frequently to his mother, to whom he was very close. To those who imagine his rise to fame was facile and meteoric, it may come as a surprise to realise that he had an uphill battle to gain a footing as a writer and he seems to have suffered from intermittent self-doubt. A useful supplement to the volume is Off the Road by Carolyn Cassady (Penguin, £9.99 in UK), who was married to Neal Cassady, a central figure in the Beat generation. She was for a time Kerouac's lover and was also close to Ginsberg, and she gives close-ups of them all and evokes the "feel" of a vanished epoch.