<DIV>"When someone asks 'Where does [Kerouac] get that stuff?' say: 'From you!' He lay awake all night listening with eyes and ears. A night of a thousand years. Heard it in the womb, heard it in the cradle, heard it in school , heard it on the floor of life's stock exchange where dreams are traded for gold." ?Henry Miller <p> One of the dozen books written by Jack Kerouac in the early and mid-1950s, <b>Maggie Cassidy</b> was not published until 1959, after the appearance of <b>On the Road</b> had made its author famous overnight, Long out of print, this touching novel of adolescent love in a New England mill town, with its straight-forward narrative structure, is one of Kerouac's most accesible works. It is a remarkable , bittersweet evocation of the awkwardness and the joy of growing up in America.</DIV>