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connect him to millions of Americans. Taking his life as legend, he asserted his standing as a representative person of his time and revealed the passion, struggles, and dignity of one life. As improbable a candidate as he may have been, Kerouac achieved his goal of becoming an American author.
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    Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings was shaped to meet the interest of readers new to Kerouac and those familiar with his writings. I took a documentary approach, piecing together an untold story. This collection represents only a portion of Kerouac’s early papers, excluding letters and notebooks. For example, there are student essays that I set aside. Favoring examples of Kerouac’s imaginative writing, I chose not to include school assignments, letters, notes, fragments of poetry and prose, and most of the commentaries on social, political, and economic issues. Although I was limited to excerpting the few longer works of the period, I used selections from two novellas and a novel as evidence of Kerouac’s gift and ambition. Until now only a few examples of Kerouac’s writing before 1944 have been published, most notably the letters in his Selected Letters: 1940—1956, edited by Ann Charters, and two short stories (“The Brothers” and “Une Veille de Noel”) reprinted from the Horace Mann literary magazine.
    Some of Kerouac’s stories went out under the names of classmates. In “Short Story,” from 1940, he boasted: “I’ve written plenty of short stories in my day, I would estimate a number of nearly 80 all of which were no good, and of which 60 of them sold for a buck apiece to my dauntless school chums in the private school. They used them under their own names and got better marks.” Photocopies of his miscellaneous writings for student newspapers and journals have been circulated over the years.
    I had access to original holographs and typescripts in the Kerouac archive. These works were created before Kerouac adopted the technique of keeping breast pocket notebooks and larger student notebooks in which he wrote prose and poetry that he later typed and sometimes expanded upon. The manuscripts do not show extensive revision. It is possible that Kerouac discarded some of the first drafts, but unlikely given his pattern of saving papers. The manuscripts are not marked “1st draft,” “2nd draft,” etc. Not all manuscripts were dated, so at times I had to date works by relying upon details in the text, typewriter font, writing style, position in the author’s files, writing tool, paper stock, and other factors. Further research may yield a finer-tuned chronology for the sequence of writings within the larger time periods presented here.
    My comments are in italics preceding the selections. Within Kerouac’s text editor’s ellipses are shown within brackets: [...]; all other ellipses appear as they do in the original manuscripts, including those with multiple ellipsis dots. Dashes and quotation marks are standardized throughout. Kerouac’s underscored words have been kept. Obvious misspellings were corrected, but unusual and perhaps intentional misspellings were kept. I maintained line breaks as they appear in Kerouac’s texts for all poems, short sketches, notes, vignettes, and prose poems, whether the original was typed or handwritten. Novel excerpts, stories, plays, essays, and long sketches appear in standard lines. With untitled pieces, I assigned a title (shown in brackets) taken from the first line or two of the composition.
    For the most part I let Kerouac speak for himself. Using source material from the author’s archive and excerpts from his published works and other commentary on Kerouac’s literature, I have tried to help the reader understand the origins and implications of the writings.
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    In the mid-1980s I worked with federal, state, and local officials; community leaders; and