And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
By (Author) Jack Kerouac
By (author) William S. Burroughs
Penguin Books Ltd
Penguin Classics
26th October 2009
6th August 2009
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
813.54
Paperback
224
Width 128mm, Height 197mm, Spine 12mm
173g
First paperback publication of the legendary collaboration between William S. Borroughs and Jack Kerouac, a hard-boiled crime novel about a shocking murder at the dawn of the Beat Generation In 1944, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs were charged as accessories to murder. One of their friends, Lucien Carr, had stabbed another, David Kammerrer. Carr had come to each of them and confessed; Kerouac helped him get rid of the weapon - neither told the police. For this failing they were arrested. Months later, the two writers - unpublished at the time - collaborated on And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a fictionalized account of the summer of the killing.
William S. Burroughs was born in 1914. His first published novel was the largely autobiographical Junky, which remains a classic depiction of drug dependency. He died in 1997. Jack Kerouac was born in 1922. In 1947, he hitchhiked across America and wrote his most famous novel On the Road. He died in 1969.