The Haunted Life

And Other Writings

By: Jack Kerouac

Narrated by: Liev Schreiber, Luke Daniels

Jack Kerouac wrote The Haunted Life in 1944 when he was 22 years old and attending Columbia University. Originally intended as a three-part novel, only this first 20,000-word section was ever finished. Upon its completion, Kerouac promptly lost his only hand-written final draft in a New York taxi cab, remaining unknown to the public until its appearance at Christies about ten years ago.

Kerouac’s family has now decided to share this manuscript with the world.

While the entirety of the novel remained unfinished, the surviving manuscript successfully works alone as a novella with a satisfying, if open-ended, conclusion. It features a scaled-down version of the Martin family and is set in Lowell, Massachusetts, as was Kerouac’s first novel The Town and The City. Kerouac had planned on writing a cycle of novels tentatively titled An American Passed Here, which was to be set primarily in the fictional town of Galloway (based on Lowell). That cycle was to contain The Haunted Life and The Sea is My Brother, tracing the story of the Martin family throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Eventually Kerouac’s plans for his Martin cycle materialized into his first novel, The Town and the City, shortly before he moved on to compose his iconic On the Road.

Todd Tietchen, the editor of the project and the Jack Kerouac/Beat Scholar in residence at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, has assembled a number of archival documents to thicken out the context of this lost novella, documents that attest to the level of intention and care that went into Kerouac’s writing projects.

©2014 John Sampas, the Estate of Stella Kerouac. (P)2014 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.

Liev Schreiber should read more

The book is better than I thought it would be. Liev Schreiber should read more.

Early Kerouac - Lowell, Ma. - shows brilliance

Disclaimer: "The Haunted Life" is the first work by Jack Kerouac that I've ever read - much less reviewed.

Commentary:

Galloway is Lowell, Ma.

A simple, yet rich & complex story about "growing up (and out)" from Lowell, Ma - right before WW II. The characters each represent different life and political philosophies. The father represents the very Conservative voices of the time (Novel written in 1944 - but published in 2014) represented by the view of Father Charles Coughlin. In the Father's introductory monologue - many of the ideas mentioned resonate today with those who are politically Conservative - and through the appropriatea Conservative news outlets.

Other characters represent wanderlust - getting out of Lowell, Ma. and ...."seeing the world as a romantic artist and adventurer with the U.S. Army.

The title comes from the idea that two of Kerouac's friends were killed in WWII - and that their loss - has "haunted" Kerouac.

A theme is also how WW II has transformed nearly everyone and everything - and this transformation was just becoming visible.

This is an "early Kerouac" work - it seems to indicate that his (Kerouac's) concerns to be expressed during his "beat era" - had their beginnings during the Great Depression and WW II.

Great writing - dealing with the "tensions of the day" - a harbinger of the greater writing yet to come.

Carl Gallozzi

An honest man is a failure by most measures.

This book seems more like a montage of images that mirror the times we are experiencing now in 2022, maybe all times, struggling to define what it means to be an American, at least the imperious ones.