Idolised by stoned students and drink-drivers everywhere, the Beat writers are now, ironically, enshrined in the literary canon. Iconoclasts par excellence, they set what Kerouac called 'the new trend in writing about drugs and sex' which has since become tediously mainstream.

These two publications, though, recreate the daring, self-destructive lives mythologised in their literature.

The lid is lifted off Kerouac's early life by a mass of well-edited letters.

He wrote columns of them, even keeping carbon copies, in the 16 years before he was catapulted to fame with the publication of On the Road.

In these 600 pages, his passage from green freshman to ambitious, reckless writer is chronicled. 'It seems to me now that my life is writing, be it only words without meaning: in the beginning, Logos,' he wrote in 1943. Fuelled often by alcohol or Benzedrine, his letters to Ginsberg, Burroughs, Snyder and Cassady define the attitudes of an entire generation, capturing what he called 'the pith of our great times.' That Beat lifestyle appears less glamorous reading Carolyn Cassady's wrenching account. She is less enthralled with the whole era, more ready to admit that there was 'a lot of sensory self-indulgence and pointless nonsense'. There is also much 'defeat and sorrow'. Married to the protagonist of On the Road, Neal Cassady, she suffered all his infidelities and imprisonments.

But she is never self-pitying; she writes with the excitement of having been a pioneer, ushering America from its sleepy, post-war innocence into the frenzied experiments of the Sixties, and towards what Kerouac termed 'narcotic imbecility'.