by Matt Perkins

Created on: February 10, 2009   Last Updated: March 10, 2009

Sal Paradise. Ray Smith. Jack Duluoz. These were the identities Jack Kerouac gave himself over the years in his best-known tales.

But how did these characters come to be? Who was Kerouac before he hit the road with buddy Neal Cassady and the rest of his beat brethren? How did Kerouac become Kerouac?

"Atop an Underwood", edited by Paul Marion, is a collection of journal entires, poems, letters, notes and short stories Kerouac had written in his late teenage years; a collection that precedes his life on the road and thereafter.

Where "Town and the City" is, in a way, a prelude to "On the Road," "Underwood" is a prelude to "Town and the City." But there is no true starting point for the Kerouac fan. Many, including myself, begin with the landmark "Road." If you're looking for some eye-opening inspiration from a truly spirited writer, you'll find it in any of Kerouac's works. And "Atop an Underwood," I've found, is as good a place to start as any.

The collection introduces the writer that Kerouac was becoming at the time of his ascension into adulthood. From his enrollment at Columbia University, to working at a gas station in Connecticut, to jetting out to sea with the Merchant Marine, Kerouac covered it all in a journalistic way; as a life reporter. These writings are evidence of a writer becoming a writer. Or, more simply, a writer doing what one does best . . . writing.

Here, you see Kerouac's literal hunger for knowledge unfold in the early 1940s, as well as his appetite for enlightenment.

"My food is often that of books," he scribbles on a typescript dated 1940 in a piece titled "I Know I Am August." "For in them I find the steak and the beef for my famished brain; And oftentimes, for dessert, I nibble at some sweet (author William) Saroyan."

But as glistening as these gems are, they're accentuated tenfold by Marion's italicized notes that precede many of the pieces, which, after clearly incredible research, describe the circumstances in which Kerouac wrote his chapters, as well as why Kerouac wrote them.

In "I Remember the Days of my Youth," Marion cites a passage in which Kerouac remembers ditching school in 1940 to meet with friends at a local pool hall behind a Lowell city dump. And where Marion gives the backdrop, Kerouac gladly gives the tale.

"We used to play hookey from school in those days. Days lashed by the white fury of New England snowstorms; and a squalid, scattered conglomeration of shacks alongside the frozen fructifications of the river dump," Kerouac

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