"The Holy Grail of Beat Writing Rises from its Watery Grave" Letter assumed lost for 60 yrs is found

[astro]

Fascinating story. Long since thought destroyed it pops up from an old publishing house archive.

• Neal Cassady’s “Joan Anderson Letter” Found!

The Holy Grail of Beat Writing Rises from its Watery Grave

All kidding aside, I wouldn’t joke about a thing like this. Neal Cassady’s long lost and famous “Joan Anderson Letter” which for almost 60 years was thought to have been lost in the waters around Sausalito has been FOUND and will be auctioned off by a southern California auction house called Profiles in History in two weeks.

For us it started one week ago. We got a mysterious phone call from someone asking if we knew anything about the writings of Neal Cassady. We said, “Sure, what do you need to know.” They said, “It’s not what we need to know, it’s what the world needs to know. We’re going to be holding a Press Conference for CNN, USA Today, all the major TV networks and we’d like you to consider holding it at The Beat Museum.” “What’s this Press Conference going to be about?” I asked. “We can’t tell you until you sign a Non-Disclosure agreement,” they said

[Snowboarder_Bo]

That totally fucking rocks!

Thanks for sharing the news, astro.

[Finagle]

The article explains everything except who the heck “Joan Anderson” was.

[astro]

Update on the auction.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/11/auction-of-neal-cassadys-long-lost-letter-to-jack-kerouac-is-suspended/?_r=0

The auction of a long-lost 1950 letter to Jack Kerouac from Neal Cassady has been canceled in the wake of ownership and other challenges brought by the estates of the two writers, Reuters reported.

The mythic, 16,000-word letter, which prompted Kerouac to toss early drafts of “On the Road” and rewrite it in a looser, headlong style, surfaced recently in the papers of a now-defunct small San Francisco publisher. It was to be sold on Dec. 17 at the southern California auction house Profiles in History, where it carried an estimate of $300,000 to $500,000, according to Reuters.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported on Dec. 4 that the Kerouac and Cassady estates had each asserted claims on the letter, which had previously been known only through a retyped fragment. A lawyer for the Kerouac estate told The Chronicle that it was seeking to receive “an agreeable split of the proceeds,” in keeping with the general principle that a physical letter belongs to the recipient, while the copyright on its contents belongs to the letter-writer.