Autograph letter signed ("J. Kerouac").

Small 4to. 1 page (214 x 172 mm) on lined paper removed from a spiral notebook. An early letter to William Burroughs ("Bill") alluding to his heroin addiction: "Allow me to congratulate you on your speedy recovery and to express the heartfelt wish that in the future there will be fewer rocky bumps on the road of life for you. In temperance is wisdom; moderation is the key to all sound accomplishment. Let us hope that the whores of evil no longer loiter on the doorsteps of your path beckoning you into the brothel of despair, and that hereinafter you may present them with the most rigid manifestations of a firm and manly will. Ad astra per aspera". - By the summer of 1945, Burroughs' addiction was starting to get him in trouble with the law, as he would later detail in his semi-autobiographical novel "Junkie". He spent that summer back in St. Louis with his parents where, one presumes, it was harder to maintain his newly cemented heroin habit. Writing to Burroughs somewhat earnestly upon his return to New York, Kerouac relays his well-wishes for his fellow Beat. - Kerouac, Selected Letters: 1940-1956 (ed. A. Charters), p. 93.