The Town and the City. Published the year one “John” Kerouac—the name it appeared under—was twenty-eight, seven years before On the Road made him famous. You could compare it to Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. With both books, it is possible that a reader who only knew the author's later work, and was given unsigned galleys, would not recognize the prose in them as theirs. One could also mention H.S. Thompson's Hell's Angels in this connection. But here's the thing—both books, or all three, are quite good, the work of real writers; if our galley reader were a discerning one he or she could predict that they'd be major authors. There's actually a strong hint of what was to come a little shy of the hundred-page mark in TTATC. A twenty-year-old ex-truck driver thinks of what's out there, all the sights and sounds a man might find on the American road; it reads a lot like, you guessed it, On the Road.

Interesting that the part set in the American thirties makes no mention of the Depression, FDR, or ominous goings-on in Europe.

Also somewhere around the hundred-page mark, the narrator's thoughts on the chthonic and domestic essence of women show Spengler's influence on Kerouac. I suppose nowadays he'd be accused of “mansplaining,” perhaps not altogether unfairly.