Maggie Cassidy (Original Manuscript)

In 1959 Avon Books published Jack Kerouac’s tender look back at his high school years in Lowell, Massachusetts, Maggie Cassidy. One particular passage in the book, written in the form of a letter, contained certain thermo-nuclear profanities that weren’t widely accepted in literature, even Beat literature, of that time period. As soon as Maggie Cassidy hit the shelves it upset bookstore owners and book distributors enough that the book was pulled, the passages rewritten, and a new, more politely…