The New York Public Library Acquires Archives of Jack Kerouac

Literary Manuscripts, Correspondence, Journals, and Fantasy Sporting Records Provide Insight to Distinctive Literary Figure

August 21, 2001, New York City--The literary and personal archives of Jack Kerouac, whose innovative and influential novel On the Road was the defining document of the Beat Generation, have been acquired by The New York Public Library’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. The large archive, which was meticulously organized and preserved by Kerouac, contains manuscripts, notebooks, letters, journals, photographs, and personal items saved from the time he was 11 through his death in 1969 at age 47. "The archive reveals in intricate detail the spirit and motives of someone who was reaching for a new, uniquely American style of literature," said Dr. Paul LeClerc, President of The New York Public Library. "This acquisition, together with the sizable Kerouac holdings already in the Library’s Berg Collection carry out Kerouac’s wishes to keep the archives together in a public institution."

Kerouac’s deceased widow, the former Stella Sampas, gave the archive to her siblings who arranged for the materials to come to the Berg Collection. The Sampas family members were childhood friends of Kerouac’s in his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. "I am ecstatic that Jack Kerouac now resides in the Library’s Berg Collection," said John Sampas, the executor of the Kerouac estate, who spearheaded the effort to see that the Kerouac archives ended up at the Library. "Jack would love living in The New York Public Library." The archives were recently transferred to The New York Public Library from a bank vault in Lowell where they had resided since 1990.

Isaac Gewirtz, the curator of the Berg Collection who traveled to Massachusetts in late July to pack the collection for shipping to New York, said, "That the Jack Kerouac archive has found its home in the Berg Collection is particularly apt since the Berg is also the home for the printed editions and manuscripts of Kerouac’s literary and spiritual forbears: Emerson, Thoreau, and, above all, Whitman. Both Whitman and Kerouac are poets of the open road, using it as a metaphor for a uniquely American experience that has universal meaning. Like Whitman, Kerouac’s writing was intimately conversational, which was a function of his desire for it to be a transforming experience, both for himself and his reader."

For the past decade, the Berg has been collecting Kerouac manuscripts, typescripts, notebooks, correspondence, and printed editions as part of a larger effort to document the Beat Movement. Though in recent years, critics have favored Ginsberg and William Burroughs as the prime originators of the Beat movement, both of them affirmed Kerouac’s originality and importance. The study of the great variety and amount of material in the Kerouac archive–drafts of published and unpublished novels and novellas, stories, poems, correspondence, and autobiographical fragments–will show the extent to which themes developed by the Beats were first explored by Kerouac, and may lead to a reevaluation that acknowledges his role as the primary force behind the establishment of the Beat Movement.

The archive contains over 1,050 manuscripts and typescripts, including novels, short stories, prose pieces, poems, and fragments; 130 notebooks for almost all of his works, both published and unpublished; fifty-two journals dating from 1934 to 1960, which include material used in The Town and the City (1950), On the Road (1957), Big Sur (1962), and other works; fifty-five diaries dating from 1956 to 1969; about 1,800 pieces of correspondence, including letters from Allen Ginsberg, William F. Buckley and Timothy Leary; seventy-two publishing contracts; and a group of papers, including two sets of more than one hundred handwritten cards, that allowed Kerouac to play a fantasy baseball game of his own invention, together with hundreds of pages that meticulously document and report on games he played between 1936 and 1965. The baseball game was originally conceived and played by Kerouac at the age of six or seven, when he spent many solitary hours in his room.

On the Road is represented by three notebooks and six early and late versions and drafts, including one of the earliest–a 1948 version with the working title Ray Smith Novel of Fall 1948. The oldest item in the collection written in Kerouac’s hand is a Valentine’s Day card created for his mother in 1933. Among the personal items in the collection are Kerouac’s harmonicas, his high school varsity letter, and a brakeman’s lamp he evidently used while a rail worker.

"The collection joins what was already the largest collection of Kerouac papers in institutional hands, including over 100 letters and sixty-two notebooks containing literary sketches, poems, and material for eight published works, among them Maggie Cassidy (1959), Mexico City Blues (1959), and Book of Dreams (1961), which had previously been acquired from the Kerouac estate," said William D. Walker, Andrew W. Mellon Director of The Research Libraries. "The archive is indispensable not only for the study of Kerouac, but for the origins and evolution of the Beat Movement in the United States." In bringing this latest group of materials to the Library, the owners of the collection were represented by Boston attorney George Tobia, Jr. of the law firm Burns & Levinson, LLP, and George Robert Minkoff of George Robert Minkoff Rare Books.

The collection will be available to researchers after a period of approximately two years for cataloging and processing. A selection of the materials will be displayed at the Library in an exhibition, New in the Berg, which will run from March 22 through July 27, 2002.

The documents in the archive provide a remarkable degree of insight to Kerouac’s development as a writer, his personality and his state of mind as he wrote his acclaimed works. "My name is John L. Kerouac, regardless of how little that may matter to the casual reader," Kerouac wrote in a 1939 journal just after arriving in New York to attend the Horace Mann School. ". . . I wish to say that this journal is a continual refreshing resource for my castle, which surrounds me; it keeps me aloof from teeming humanity; It keeps me in contact with myself. By that I mean that a continual flow of ideas from my turbulent mind find their way into these pages invariably. . . .Tonight I evolved a plan of self-tutoring which I commenced officially. The subjects are five in number and I shall take one per evening, with a subsequent self-examination for the week after." Kerouac was an avid diarist and note taker, and since his fiction mostly stemmed from his actual experiences, his journals and personal documents are particularly revelatory. They show a figure restlessly working in his diaries, fiction, and letters toward connection with others and expression of the rich humanity he experienced in his travels and daily life.

Jack Kerouac

Kerouac was born in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts. He was a football star in high school in Lowell and later at Horace Mann Preparatory School. He attended Columbia University on a football scholarship, but broke his leg in a game in his first year. An avid athlete and sports fan, he kept the crutches used after his injury, perhaps as a reminder of his former athletic glory, for the rest of his life. They are now among the realia in the collection at the Library. Shortly after the accident he dropped out of Columbia and in 1942 joined the Merchant Marine. He also served in the Navy.

Kerouac had a strong yen for travel. Military service took him to Greenland and England, and later journeys took him to Mexico, North Africa, and Europe, as well as all over the United States. He wrote continuously throughout his life and portions of his literary output were never published. He wrote his first novel, The Town and the City in the late forties; it was published in 1950. In 1948 he took his first cross-country trips with his friend Neal Cassady, which were the basis of On the Road. The publication of On the Road in 1957 thrust him into the spotlight as the spokesman for the "Beat Generation." He traveled and wrote all over the U.S.: Visions of Cody in New York and San Francisco, Doctor Sax in Mexico City, Visions of Gerard in North Carolina, Desolation Angels in Washington state, The Dharma Bums in Florida. Kerouac died of a hemorrhage resulting from alcoholism, on October 21, 1969 in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he was living with his wife Stella, and his mother.

Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature

The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature is one of America’s most celebrated collections of first editions, rare books, autograph letters, and manuscripts. It was assembled and presented to The New York Public Library by Dr. Albert A. Berg (1872—1950), famous New York surgeon and trustee of the Library, in memory of his brother, Dr. Henry W. Berg. Both men found relaxation from their medical careers in collecting the works and memorabilia of English and American writers. The original collection, which numbered 3,500 items, has grown through acquisitions and gifts to include some 20,000 printed items and 50,000 manuscripts, covering the entire range of English and American literature. The Berg Collection includes manuscripts by T. S. Eliot, Eugene O’Neill, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, W. B. Yeats, Walt Whitman, and many others. The Kerouac Archive will join the archives of Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov, and an extensive collection of first and rare editions of Beat writers, including journals and ephemera, that document the Beat Movement in the United States. There are also small but significant collections of manuscripts and correspondence of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, and several other Beat writers in the Berg Collection.

# # #

Please contact the Public Relations Office for available images from the archive.

Contact: Herb Scher and Sabina Potaczek at 212.221.7676

(hscher@nypl.org, spotaczek@nypl.org)