Maggie Cassidy

Maggie Cassidy
First edition
Author	Jack Kerouac
Country	United States
Language	English
Publisher	Avon
Publication date	1959
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	208 pp

Maggie Cassidy is a novel by the American writer Jack Kerouac, first published in 1959. It is a largely autobiographical work about Kerouac's early life in Lowell, Massachusetts, from 1938 to 1939, and chronicles his real-life relationship with his teenage sweetheart Mary Carney. It is unique for Kerouac for its high school setting and teenage characters. He wrote the novel in 1953 but it was not published until 1959, after the success of On the Road (1957).

Character key

Kerouac often based his fictional characters on friends and family.^[1][2]

"Because of the objections of my early publishers I was not allowed to use the same personae names in each work." ^[3]

Trivia

• One of the scenes in the novel is strongly reminiscent of a scene in The Sorrows of Young Werther. In Kerouac’s novel, a blizzard rages outside during a party organized for the seventeenth birthday of Jack Duluoz. The party is the start of the estrangement of Jack and Maggie. The first time Werther meets his Lotte is during a ball in the country whilst a storm (foreshadowing Werther’s demise) is passing outside.^[4] Kerouac is known to have read Goethe. ^[5]

• The fictitious name of Kerouac’s girlfriend echoes the name of Neal Cassady. Who, under the fictitious name of Dean Moriarty, would be the centre of Kerouac’s attention in On the Road. Kerouac meant the two books to be part of the same life. Together with books such as The Subterraneans and The Dharma Bums they make up the Duluoz legend which Kerouac compared to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. “[...]except that my remembrances are written on the run instead of afterwards in a sick bed.”^[6]

References

• Kerouac, Jack (1959). Maggie Cassidy. Avon Books. 

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Maggie Cassidy

• New York Times book review