23 “Because The Only People For Me Are The Mad Ones” 27KEROUAC, Jack. On the Road. New York, 1957. Octavo, original black cloth, dust jacket, custom clamshell box. $12,000 First edition of Kerouac’s second and most important novel, in colorful original dust jacket. “Between 1947 and 1950, Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac took off on a freewheeling journey through the USA and Mexico in search of something outside their domestic experience. Ten years later their adventures were related in On the Road… The novel’s composition has become a well-known anecdote in its own right. Returning home from his wanderings, Kerouac spent almost a year pondering how (specifically, in what form) he might convey the life he had been living. Several false starts were made, but in April 1951 he fed a 120-foot roll of teletype into his typewriter, typed for three weeks and the result, largely unrevised, was On the Road” (Parker, 339). Book fine, bright dust jacket with a bit of chipping to spine ends, a few short closed tears to bottom edge, creasing along flap folds. A near-fine copy. “A Magnificent Classic”: Invisible Man, Inscribed By Ralph Ellison 28ELLISON, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York, 1952. Octavo, original cloth, dust jacket, custom clamshell box. $13,500 First edition of Ralph Ellison’s great American novel, boldly inscribed by him, “Best wishes from Ralph Ellison.” “It is a resolutely honest, tormented, profoundly American book” (Wright Morris, New York Times, 1952). Winner of the 1952 National Book Award, Ellison’s matchless first novel is “one of the most important works of the 20th century” (New York Times). This is a work in which Ellison’s “visionary genius achieved a perfection” (Harold Bloom, Genius)—and the only novel published in his lifetime— Invisible Man is a “magnificent classic… [which] soon became a vital and permanent contribution to American literature” (Blockson 86). Book with interior fine, faint trace of rubbing to front board. Light edge-wear to exceptionally lovely dust jacket. A near-fine copy, very scarce inscribed.
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