JACK KEROUAC, champion of the Beat generation, established himself as an iconic novelist and poet many years ago, but his career as a playwright is only just beginning.

The writer, who died 36 years ago, is about to have his first play published, his agent announced yesterday.

Beat Generation, which portrays a day in the drink and drug-fuelled life of the author’s literary alter ego, Jack Duluoz, lay unopened in a New Jersey warehouse for 48 years until his agent decided to reread it.

Sterling Lord, who continues to act as Kerouac’s agent, has arranged to publish the play in October after serialisation in a men’s magazine.

Kerouac first tried to get the play performed in 1957, the year he completed his seminal novel On the Road, but it received a chilly reception. “Lillian Hellman (an American playwright and producer) turned it down,” Mr Lord recalled. “We even sent it to Marlon Brando.”

Eventually the author despaired and asked Mr Lord to mothball the project. Kerouac produced 16 other books before his death from alcohol-related haemorrhage, but never attempted to write for the stage again.

The play depicts its author as he gambles and attends parties with thinly-veiled characters based on Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and other giants of the Beat era.

Mr Lord said the play would surprise Kerouac fans. “It is quite different,” he said. “It conveys the mood of the time extraordinarily well, and also the characters are authentically drawn. Some people have compared it to some of the great European playwrights.”

Kerouac often wrote about himself as Jack Duluoz, a Beat character prone to drinking and depriving himself of sleep. The character appears nine times in his books, which formed part of the author’s unfinished “Duluoz Legend”, the exploration of Beat culture. On the Road became the iconic text in the series, although Kerouac appears under the pseudonym Sal Paradise in the novel.

On the Road exemplified Kerouac’s writing style. He typed it on a continuous roll of paper using a method he called “spontaneous writing”, pouring out his thoughts in a continous stream. He referred to the book, the story of two men on a trip across America, as a jazz composition.

Beat Generation will be published in October by Thunders Mouth Press, which recently released Departed Angels: The Lost Paintings, a book of Kerouac’s artwork.

The inspiration to publish the book came after a request by Stephen Perrine, the editor-in-chief of Best Life, a men’s health magazine. “I heard this voice in my ear that said, ‘Ask Sterling if he has any undiscovered manuscripts’,” he told the New York Post. “So I did, and Sterling said, ‘That’s so strange you should ask that’.”

Kerouac regarded himself as the unlikely leader of the Beat movement. He was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac in Lowell, Massachusetts. He won an American football scholarship to Columbia University, but dropped out to become a merchant seaman and enlist in the US Navy.

He came into his element when, on his return to New York, he met Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

The literary value of Beat Generation remains to be seen, but the manuscript, if sold, is likely to attract substantial offers. The manuscript of On the Road sold recently for $2.4 million (£1.3 million).

FATHER OF THE BEAT GENERATION

In 1958 he also wrote and narrated a Beat film called Pull My Daisy

He died in 1969 of an internal haemorrhage probably caused by alcoholism

Kerouac is said to have coined the term “Beat generation” to refer to his and his friends’ “beatness” or “weariness”

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