And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

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And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks  

UK first edition cover
Author Jack Kerouac &
William S. Burroughs
Country United States
Language English
Genre(s) Mystery
Publisher Grove Press (US)
Penguin Classics (UK)
Publication date 1 November 2008 (US)
Media type Hardcover

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is a novel written in 1945 by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, several years before the two Beat Generation founders achieved notoriety with On the Road and Junkie, respectively. It was first published in its entirety in 2008.

Intended to be a mystery novel, Burroughs later (in an interview featured in the 1986 documentary What Happened to Kerouac?) dismissed it as "not a distinguished work." Kerouac and Burroughs were initially unable to get the book published.

The format of the book consists of alternating chapters written by each author writing as a different character. Burroughs (writing under the same William Lee pseudonym he would later employ with Junkie) writes the character "Will Dennison" while Kerouac (writing as "John Kerouac"), takes on the character of "Mike Ryko".[1][2]

According to the book The Beat Generation in New York by Bill Morgan, the novel was based upon the killing of David Kammerer who was obsessed with Lucien Carr. Carr stabbed Kammerer to death in a drunken fight, in self defense by some accounts, then dumped Kammerer's body into the Hudson River. Carr later confessed the crime, first to Burroughs, then to Kerouac, neither of whom reported it to the police. After Carr turned himself in to the police, Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested as accessories after the fact. Kerouac served some jail time because his father refused to bail him out but Burroughs was bailed out by his family. (Kerouac married Edie Parker while in jail, and she then paid his bail.)[3] The title itself comes from a news broadcast heard by Burroughs, covering a fire at the St Louis Zoo, and in which the announcer broke into hysterics on reading the line (although James Grauerholz, in his afterword to the 2008 publication, indicated that the origin of the title is unconfirmed and may have been related to a zoo incident in Egypt, or possibly even a fire that occurred at a circus.)[4]

Excerpts from And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks were published for the first time in Word Virus: A William S. Burroughs Reader which was released after Burroughs' death. According to Grauerholz numerous attempts were made by Kerouac and others to get the book published, culminating in a lawsuit filed by Burroughs over the use of quotations from the manuscript that appeared in New York magazine in 1976; the lawsuit, which was settled in the 1980s, established the ownership of the work.[5]. When Burroughs died in 1997, his longtime companion Grauerholz became the executor of Burroughs' estate and was put in charge of the disposition of his unpublished works; out of respect for Carr, who Grauerholz befriended and who was still alive as of 1997, Grauerholz agreed not to publish the manuscript until after Carr's death; Carr died in 2005 and this opened the door for the book to be published at last.[6].

Penguin Books published the book in November 2008.[7][8] An Amercian edition was published by Grove Press on November 1, although it was available via online retailers such as Amazon prior to this date.

Sources

References and footnotes

  1. ^ William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (New York: Grove Press, 2008), p. 3
  2. ^ For a modern-day example of this form of collaborative writing, see Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist (2006) by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, who write alternative chapters writing as the two protagonists.
  3. ^ Bill Morgan, The Beat Generation in New York, quoted on website Great Good Places, accessed 2008-11-09
  4. ^ James Grauerholz, "Afterword", And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, (New York: Grove Press, 2008), p. 196-198
  5. ^ Grauerholz, p. 206-207
  6. ^ Grauerholz, p. 208
  7. ^ And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
  8. ^ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/02/wkerouac102.xml
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