The Sea Is My Brother

The Sea Is My Brother

2011 first edition cover
Author	Jack Kerouac
Language	English
Publisher	Penguin
Publication date	November 24, 2011
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardback)
Pages	158 pages
ISBN	978-0-14-119333-5

The Sea Is My Brother is a novel by the American author Jack Kerouac, published in 2011. The novel was written in 1942 and remained unpublished throughout Kerouac's lifetime due to his dissatisfaction with it. The plot and its characters are based on Kerouac's experience in United States Merchant Marine during World War II.

Kerouac served on the troop transport Dorchester from July through October 1942 before returning to Columbia University. The Dorchester would be torpedoed three months after Kerouac's departure with most of the 600-man crew dying including the Four Chaplains. This service inspired him to write Sea.^[1] The author, who was 20 years old when Sea was written, allegedly thought that the book was "a crock [of shit] as literature",^[1] and apparently did not bother to shop it around to publishers. Dawn Ward, editor of the Penguin edition of The Sea Is my Brother, holds that while the novel is not the same as the great work Kerouac produced later in his life, it illuminates Kerouac's early development as a writer. "It was referred to briefly in letters, but nothing that led anyone to believe that there was this really large volume ... This book is really quite important as it shows how Jack developed his writing process."^[1]