Existing comment:
Jack Kerouac
Typed letter to Stella Sampas
Signed, with pieta drawing in blue and red pen on the verso of printed Christmas greeting card with holograph inscription in pen, "To Stella & family from Jack (over)," December 23, 1965
Stella Sampas, who would marry Kerouac in November 1966, first met him through her brother Sebastian, Kerouac's closest friend, in the summer of 1941. The "St. Sabbas" and "Sammy" to whom Kerouac refers in the third paragraph is Sebastian, who is mortally wounded during the Second World War on the Anzio beachhead. The new book to which Kerouac refers is Vanity of Duluoz, a sardonic memoir of his youth, which would be the last book that he would write. Kerouac's drawing of a pieta is an Easter image, a demonstration of his being drawn more to the sad solemnity of Christ's death than he was to the joy of his birth. |