ISBN: 0-88739-368-3
223 pp.
Size: 6 x 9
Pub Date: 10/2000
Paperback Original
Price: $14.95
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Nobody's Wife: The Smart Aleck and the King of the Beats
Joan Haverty Kerouac
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 - it 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.
Review: "Joan Haverty... not only the mother of Jack Kerouac's only child, but also a remarkable chronicler of her era... We can prize her honesty in her poignant description of the perils of heart and spirit facing a bright, insightful female barely out of girlhood seeking an independent life in the early 1950s."
-Ann Charters
"Writing in clear, often graceful prose, the author recalls her struggle for self-realization in New York City in the early 1950s...Kerouac's memoir is required reading for anyone interested in the role of women in the Beat Generation. Highly recommended."
-William Gargan, Brooklyn College Library
"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."
-David Adox, New York Times
"Kerouac aficionados have been salivating for this memoir since two excerpts appeared [in 1996]..."
-Library Journal
Bio: JOAN HAVERTY KEROUAC was inspired to write this memoir by the literary success of the daughter she had by Jack Kerouac. After a brave, ten-year fight with breast cancer, Joan died in 1990.
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