Unpublished Jack Kerouac play discovered

Monday, May 23rd 2005, 1:02 pm

By: News On 6

NEW YORK (AP) _ An unpublished, three-act play by Jack Kerouac, based on his drunken Beat adventures, has been discovered recently and will be excerpted next month in BestLife magazine.

``The part we're excerpting will show Kerouac and Neal Cassady at a racetrack, and they're partying and gambling,'' Best Life editor-in-chief Stephen Perrine said Monday. ``But they're also talking about reincarnation and other obsessions. It's more an exploration of their inner lives.''

The entire play will be published this fall by Thunder's Mouth Press.

Kerouac wrote ``Beat Generation'' _ which draws on his life and those of other Beat writers, including Cassady and Allen Ginsberg _ in 1957, the same year his classic ``On the Road'' was released. He tried to build interest for ``Beat Generation'' in the theater world, contacting such people as Lillian Hellman and Marlon Brando, but he failed and set the manuscript aside. Kerouac died in 1969.

Perrine said that he learned about the play while having lunch with Sterling Lord, Kerouac's agent.

``I swear this is true: On my way to lunch, this voice came into my head, telling me to ask Sterling whether he had any old manuscripts,'' said Perrine, whose men's magazine focuses on family, career and self, has also published work by David Mamet, Steve Martin and Nick Hornby. ``It turns out he had had a bunch of files sent to him from a New Jersey warehouse to his New York office and he came across this play.''