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Why was And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks not published until 2008?

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Portrait of Jack Kerouac, American novelist and poet, looking over his shoulder in a collared shirt, circa 1965. — Jack Kerouac American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac, c. 1965.

The novel And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a collaboration between Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, was written in 1945 as a fictionalized account of the real-life killing of David Kammerer by their acquaintance Lucien Carr. The book was not published until 2008 because it was rejected by publishers at the time it was written.1