Big Sur

New York: Farrar, Strau & Cudahy, (1962). First edition, 1st printing. 8vo. 241 pp. Original quarter black cloth over blue marbled paper-covered boards, stamped in gold, in original unclipped ($4.50) dust-jacket. Light edge wear, a few nicks, some handling wrinkling to jacket. Consistent foxing throughout. Protected in archival mylar. Book is tight, square and firm. Light wear to edges, panels and corners. A few nicks and bumps. Front pastedown wrinkled. Page edges with light vintage toning, a few light smudges. Light curling to spine ends. Some stray pencil notations to a few pages.

Dust Jacket: Very Good

Hardcover: Very Good

“Big Sur is a 1962 novel by Jack Kerouac, written in the fall of 1961 over a ten-day period, with Kerouac typewriting onto a teletype roll.[1] It recounts the events surrounding Kerouac's (here known by the name of his fictional alter-ego Jack Duluoz) three brief sojourns to a cabin in Bixby Canyon, Big Sur, California, owned by Kerouac's friend and Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti; at the same time dealing with his increased drinking and declining mental health. It is Kerouac’s first novel to be fully written following his success in the late 1950s, and thus departs from his previous fictionalized autobiographical series in that the character Duluoz is shown as a popular, published author; most of Kerouac's previous novels instead portray him as a bohemian traveller.