The New Yorker has unlocked a selection of Jack Kerouac’s journals that ran in the magazine back in 1998. Beginning with his near-completion of Town and City, and ending days after its publication, the text captures the growing pains of a 25-year-old author:
Got form-rejection card from Macmillan’s. I’m getting more confident and angrier each time something like this happens, because I know “The Town and the City” is a great book in its own awkward way. And I’m going to sell it. I’m ready for any battle there is. Even if I have to go off and starve on the road I won’t give up the notion that I should make a living from this book: I’m convinced that people themselves will like it whenever the wall of publishers and critics and editors is torn down. It is they who are my enemies, not “obscurity” or “poverty.”
