The first book from iconic American writer Jack Kerouac, which went unpublished and was considered lost during his lifetime, has finally been published 42 years after his death.

The original 158-page handwritten manuscript was Kerouac's first novel, begun when the writer - most famous for his free-wheeling trip across America captured in On The Road - kept a journal of life at sea as a merchant marine, in 1942, when he was just 20 years old.

The Sea is My Brother: The Lost Novel, showcases a young Kerouac's gritty talent 15 years before the release of On The Road, a talent which would later bloom during the late 1950s "beat" movement.

He died in 1969 at age 47 from an internal haemorrhage after many years of heavy drinking.

The newly-published novel follows the character of Wesley Martin, a man Kerouac said "loved the sea with a strange, lonely love; the sea is his brother and sentences. He goes down," according to publishers Penguin.

The Sea is My Brother traces the tale of two friends working on a ship - arguing, drinking and contemplating their isolation as they journey from Boston to Greenland.

In notes found for the book, Kerouac envisioned the characters as "the vanishing American, the big free by, the American Indian, the last of the pioneers, the last of the hoboes," Penguin said.

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The book is, in Kerouac's words, about a "man's simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies".

Penguin says it is "a unique insight into the young Kerouac and the formation of his genius".

But Kerouac's biographer, Gerald Nicosia, said if the author was still alive, he would have taken a dim view of the publisher's decision to release the novel.

"He actually called it [the newly-released novel], and this was a quote, he said it is a crock - meaning a crock of shit. He said it is a crock as literature," he said.

Searching for recognition

The king of the beat generation shot to fame as an iconoclast, but it seems he is now being recognised as part of the literary establishment.

Nicosia says Kerouac always wanted to be seen as a serious literary force, and that part of the reason for the author's descent into drugs and alcohol was because he did not get recognition in his lifetime as a serious writer.

"In the line of Balzac or Proust or Dostoevsky, he felt like this was the kind of recognition he wanted, but that was not the recognition that he got," he said.

"He got the recognition because they portrayed him as this handsome, drunken rebel. The TV shows loved him and they loved to make fun of him, and so he became this caricature, this beatnik caricature, and that really kind of destroyed him.

"Because they weren't looking at him as a serious writer who created a new vision for his time, which is what he wanted to be seen as."

Paul Giles, the Challis Chair of English at the University of Sydney, says the release will help academics put Kerouac in to a literary tradition.

"I think one interesting thing about this particular work is that it will fit with the American literary tradition of sea narratives, going back to Moby Dick and Richard Henry Dana and others," he said.

"There is a long tradition of sea narratives in the 19th century which this will, I think, be picking up on."

And Mr Giles disagrees with the idea that the release is simply a publishing company trying to cash in ahead of Christmas.

"I think it is definitely worthwhile. I suspect that the sales will be more academic audiences rather than popular audiences," he said.

"I don't think that Kerouac is quite so well known or widely read among the young. But Kerouac I think has now taken on that kind of eminence grise aspect ... rather like people like JD Salinger has, and people who were once thought of as rebellious and counter-cultural and are now seen as very much part of that kind of institutional formation of American culture after World War Two."

ABC/AFP