While Kerouac’s demise haunts the text, the correspondence between him and Ginsberg is remarkable for its breadth — roughly two hundred letters written over nineteen years — for its quality, and most of all for the strength of the relationship it chronicles. Their letters contain an astonishing level of candor, warmth, encouragement, and above all, respect. They are marked by a mutual sensitivity to the insecurities that hound aspiring artists: “Ginsberg will be the name, like Einstein in Science, that the Jews will bring up when they claim pride in Poetry,” predicted Kerouac.
     Fascinated with pushing the boundaries of form, these letters explode conventions. At times calling them “avant-garde” would seem to understate their novelty. Kerouac and Ginsberg pushed each other to combine the emotional content of their earlier, more conventional letters with the “spontaneous writing” experiments they embarked on in the 1950s. Much has been made of the connection between be-bop and beatnik, between improvised jazz and “spontaneous” writing. Kerouac notably refers to his writing as “blowing” in a number of letters and would eventually teach the method to Ginsberg, writing, “You just have to purify your mind and let it pour the words (which effortless angels of the vision fly when you stand in front of reality) . . . and slap it all down shameless, willy-nilly, rapidly until sometimes I got so inspired I lost consciousness I was writing.”