Kerouac play discovered in warehouse

NEW YORK - A previously unknown play by Jack Kerouac, written in the same year as his beatnik classic novel "On The Road" was published, has been discovered languishing in a warehouse more than three decades after his death.

Best Life magazine, which plans to publish an excerpt from the play called Beat Generation in its July issue, said on Monday the play came to light when Kerouac's agent Sterling Lord was going through old files in a warehouse in New Jersey.

The play details "a day in the drink-and-drug-hazed life of his own literary alter ego, Jack Duluoz, as he parties and gambles with thinly veiled characters based on Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and other Beat legends".

Best Life editor Stephen Perrine said he met Lord for lunch several weeks ago and it occurred to him to ask whether he had any undiscovered manuscripts. "Sterling remarked, 'That's so strange that you should ask that'," Perrine said.

Kerouac, who died in 1969 at the age of 47, wrote the play in 1957, the same year "On The Road," a thinly fictionalised autobiography about a cross-country journey that became a classic of American 20th Century literature, was published.

Best Life, a lifestyle magazine for men, said in a statement that Lord recalled the play had been sent to Marlon Brando before Kerouac asked Lord to shelve the project and it lay waiting in his files, forgotten for nearly 50 years.

The entire play will be published in October by Thunder's Mouth Press.

"This is a major work by one of the biggest names in American literary history, and here it is, unread, gathering dust for nearly half a century," Perrine said.

The July issue of the magazine with the excerpt goes on sale June 14.

- REUTERS