Someday We'll Build Cabins: The Letters of Jack Kerouac, Jacques Beckwith, and Lois Sorrells Beckwith

by Jack Kerouac, Jacques Beckwith (With), Lois Sorrells Beckwith (With), Bill Morgan (Editor)

Overview

A book of letters revealing the inner desires and turmoils of Jack Kerouac after his rise to literary acclaim in the 1960s.

In 1960, Jack Kerouac began a correspondence with a New York artist by the name of Jacques Beckwith. The basic subject of their letters was always the same. They each longed to build a cabin in the forest which would serve as a retreat from the pressure and disappointment of the outside world. "I want to live in the woods where I don't even have to think about this evil world of wars and dishonesties," Kerouac wrote. Beckwith offered to help Jack design and build his retreat, but after years of planning only Jacques realized the dream. The world was too much with Kerouac.

Alcoholism, a paternity suit, travel, the demands of a writing career, marriage, and eventually his mother's declining health kept him from making his break. These letters document all these distractions and frustrations and reveal Kerouac's desire for the solitude which Beckwith found in the New England woods.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644282915
Publisher:	Rare Bird Books
Publication date:	04/15/2025
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia Universityin New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the “Beat generation” and made Kerouac one of the most best-known writers of his time. Publication of many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur. Kerouac considered all of his autobiographical fiction to be part of “one vast book,” The Duluoz Legend. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.

Jacques Beckwith (1920-2000) was an artist and carpenter living and working during the 1950s and 60s. He was a founding member of the Hansa Gallery, one of the legendary downtown New York galleries clustered around E. I 0th Street during that period.

Editorial Reviews

05/08/2023

This slight compendium collects the Beat poet’s correspondence with Lois Sorrells, with whom Kerouac shared a “rocky” romantic entanglement in the late 1950s and early ’60s, and the man she eventually married, “carpenter-painter” Jacques Beckwith. Spanning 1960–1968, the letters focus on Kerouac and Beckwith’s dream of building a cabin together where Kerouac could write without distraction. The plan formed shortly after the two met in Greenwich Village in 1960, becoming instant friends. Kerouac’s entries reveal his pining for a simpler life “with nothing to do but keep warm & make hot pea soup,” and detail his failed efforts to realize his pastoral ambitions, as when he discusses how a trip to look at potential homes came to naught after he and Beckwith instead went on a bender. The letters also describe how Sorrell grew apart from Kerouac as she fell in love with Beckwith, whom she married in 1964, though the scant contextual background for their correspondence leaves the details of their relationship hazy. The couple moved into a cabin in West Cornwall, Conn., but Kerouac, distracted by a paternity suit, never got his own. Though there are flashes of Kerouac’s signature prose style (he writes of his yearning to see “God’s sunny purpose in afternoon curtains slowly moving as birds sing in pines”), the letters largely address such mundane matters as coordinating travel, and offer little insight into the poet’s character. Only die-hard Kerouac fans need apply. (July)

Publishers Weekly