Kerouac's first novel to be published for first time

The first novel Jack Kerouac ever wrote, when he was a merchant mariner in 1942, will be published in its entirety for the first time.

The Sea is My Brother was described by the Beat Generation icon as "man's simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies."

The 158-page manuscript follows the life of Wesley Martin who has a "strange, lonely love" of the sea.

In Kerouac's own notes about the book, he talks about the characters in The Sea is My Brother as symbolic of "the vanishing American … the American Indian, the last of the pioneers, the last of the hoboes."

The manuscript has been acquired by HarperCollins in the U.S., according to Publishers Marketplace trade paper, and will be published in 2010.

The Sea is My Brother comes on a wave of unpublished work from the author, who died in 1969 at age 47, that has recently been brought to light.

A 1945 collaboration with William Burroughs, And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks, was published for the first time in 2008.

Fans also got their hands on the first publication of Wake Up, Kerouac's 1955 biography of the founder of Buddhism, Siddhartha Gautama.

In 2007, the entire "original scroll" of On the Road was released for the first time. It coincided with the 50th anniversary of the publication of the stream-of-consciousness novel, written in a drug-fuelled 20 days in New York, which inspired the beatnik movement.