Famed Cassady letter to Kerouac to go up for auction

After an 18-month legal battle over its ownership, a long-lost manuscript by Beat legend Neal Cassady later credited by Jack Kerouac for inspiring the writing style in “On the Road,” will be auctioned in June. After authenticating it, Jean Spinosa, the woman in possession of the artifact, offered it up for auction in late 2014, announcing it at a media event at the Beat Museum in North Beach. The family holds claim to the words on the manuscript, then plans to publish it in some fashion, Cassady said, finally bringing to light one of the crucial artifacts in the history of the Beat Generation. In advance of the auction, set for June 16 at New York’s Rockefeller Center, the yellowing pages, with typing on both sides, pencil and pen edits and an illustration, will make a national tour, reaching San Francisco where they will be under glass and open to free visitation June 2-4 at Weinstein Gallery, South of Market. “It is a unique opportunity to find a foundational document that changed the course of literary history, and not just American literary history but world literary history.” said Tom Lecky, specialist and department head of books and manuscripts at Christie’s auction house. Lecky also handled the auction of the original scroll of Kerouac’s “On the Road,” which was estimated to sell at between $1 million and $1.5 million but went for $2.2 million at an auction attended by collectors from all over the world. Based on that, Lecky estimates the value of the Cassady manuscript at between $400,000 and $600,000 but expects an international bidding war to drive the price skyward. The letter is a prolonged meditation on his life and activities in a free-flowing automatic prose that is raw and expressive, flowing from his fingerprints through the typewriter. “It truly is the document that caused Kerouac to change his writing style to what he later called ‘spontaneous prose,’ thereby changing literary history,” Cimino said. Spinosa broke off all contact with him and McQuate is now embroiled in a separate lawsuit, to claim his 50 percent ownership of her share of the auction proceeds. [...] he has read most of the books and letters by both Cassady and Kerouac and he looks forward to seeing the “Anderson Letter” in published form.