Nobody's Wife: The Smart Aleck and the King of the Beats

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It was 1950. Strikingly beautiful twenty-year-old Joan Haverty had arrived in New York City and was working as a seamstress. During a deteriorating attempt to reconcile with her lover, fate intervened when Joan heard a stranger's voice calling up to her loft from the street below&#151it was Jack Kerouac, needing the door unlocked so he could get to a party.

Thus began Joan's stormy romance with and brief marriage to the leather-jacketed archangel of the Beat Generation. She ...

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More About This Book

Overview

It was 1950. Strikingly beautiful twenty-year-old Joan Haverty had arrived in New York City and was working as a seamstress. During a deteriorating attempt to reconcile with her lover, fate intervened when Joan heard a stranger's voice calling up to her loft from the street below&#151it was Jack Kerouac, needing the door unlocked so he could get to a party.

Thus began Joan's stormy romance with and brief marriage to the leather-jacketed archangel of the Beat Generation. She bore his tirades, his passion, his troubled poetic genius, and also bore his child while Kerouac was writing his great signature novel On the Road.

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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Haverty Kerouac (who died in 1990) has mellowed since her article "My Ex-Husband, Jack Kerouac, Is an Ingrate" ran in Confidential magazine, but her posthumous memoir struggles with how the famed writer fit into her bohemian youth. Indeed, this memoir is as much about Haverty's early grab at independence in 1950s New York and the other men in that period of her life as it is about her brief marriage to the Beat hero, which produced his only child. The 20-year-old Haverty had arrived in Manhattan after working on a fishing boat with Kerouac's friend Bill Cannastra, had found work as a seamstress and was finishing an affair with a Columbia physics graduate student when Kerouac appeared on her doorstep. His impulsive marriage proposal offered some solace for Cannastra's sudden death, as well as, the author admits, a means to motherhood. She was unprepared, however, for Kerouac's conventional ideas about a wife's place, whether in public or in bed. Her memoir ends as suddenly as their marriage, with Haverty headed home to Albany, envisioning neither her ex's later fame nor her protracted legal fight for child support. Unlike the memoirs of their daughter, Jan (Baby Driver; Trainsong), Haverty's straightforward, infrequently lyric prose isn't under the spell of the Beats--which will probably count against her with Kerouac-worshipping Beat fans. (Jan. 15) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Kerouac aficionados have been salivating for this memoir since two excerpts appeared in Women of the Beat Generation (LJ 10/1/96). They will not be disappointed. Kerouac's second wife and the mother of the late novelist Jan Kerouac began the book in 1980, ten years before she died of breast cancer. Writing in clear, often graceful prose, the author recalls her struggle for self-realization in New York City in the early 1950s, recording how difficult it was for a woman to transcend the gender roles of that particular place and time. She provides an eyewitness account of Kerouac's troubled relationship with his mother and includes new material on her relationship with Bill Cannastra, a Harvard Law School graduate and Beat angel who died in a senseless subway accident. Along with Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters (LJ 1/15/83; Penguin USA, 1999. reprint) and Carolyn Cassady's Off the Road (LJ 6/15/90), Kerouac's memoir is required reading for anyone interested in the role of women in the Beat Generation. Highly recommended.--William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
David Adox
Nobody's Wife delivers colorful portraits of Jack's dependence on his mother, his friendship with Neal Cassady and his struggle to write ''On the Road.'' It shows the fragile and insecure side of Kerouac, and interweaves details of Kerouac's life with the story of a young, smart and sensitive woman coming of age in the 1950's.
—New York Times Book Review
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780887393686
  • Publisher: Creative Arts Book Company
  • Publication date: 9/28/2000
  • Pages: 223
  • Product dimensions: 6.02 (w) x 8.99 (h) x 0.68 (d)

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