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Among great literary myths, the one of Jack Kerouac is often reduced to a vibe The open road, a cigarette, a postwar rebel leaning on a beat-up car – a masculine archetype of rebellion and hedonism. Kerouac’s 1957 book On the Road was the bible of the beat generation and chronicles, in startlingly unfiltered prose, his travels across the US with fellow writers Allen Ginsberg, William S Burroughs, and his lifelong muse, the dashing Neal Cassady. The book shifted the course of US literature and captured the imagination of a rapidly changing world. Kerouac was crowned king of the beats, a moniker he later despised.
This, at least, is what many students of US literature know. But a new exhibition Running Through Heaven: Visions of Jack Kerouac at New York’s Grolier Club aims to rehumanize the myth, with letters from Kerouac that have never been publicly viewed before.
Jacob Loewentheil, the collector and historian who owns all items in the exhibit and is also its curator, says his collection started with Kerouac’s copy of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed, which will be on display. On an inside cover, Loewentheil found a note penned in the author’s hand: “as if they were all running through heaven.” This inspired the show’s title.
At a “lesser-known auction house”, Loewentheil later found letters, correspondence from Kerouac’s years at Columbia University, most written to a friend back home in Lowell, Massachusetts. The correspondence catches Kerouac “just coming to New York and having his world broadened from Lowell into this enormous metropolitan life”, Loewentheil says on a video call. The letters describe “books he read in school and his thoughts about them”.
Loewentheil believe they show early forms and experiments of what would become Kerouac’s signature “spontaneous prose” technique. “He tried it out on his friends,” says Loewentheil.
The exhibition coincides with Loewentheil’s new book, which shares the show’s title and includes a foreword by the Beat scholar and Kerouac collaborator Ann Charters. In the book, Loewentheil writes that the letters connect “with a young man in the midst of forming the vision and voice that would come to define a generation”.
In the letters, it’s clear that Kerouac believed from a young age that he would be famous and that his letters would be read by future readers. “He was very sure that he was going to be a great writer,”says Loewentheil. “But he was very concerned with how everyone was going to see him, and how everyone around him saw him”.
The exhibit raises questions: should personal letters be deemed part of Kerouac’s literary work? Should they be read at all? These are topics that Loewentheil hopes the exhibition invites: how readers should see these documents and other texts more clearly understood to be private writing. “I have documents Kerouac called ‘notes to myself’ in the collection,” says Loewentheil, and describing these as “stream-of-consciousness”. At least one is in the exhibit.
The show also features personal objects, which Loewentheil calls “relics”, that puncture the road-vagabond image. “Kerouac spent most of his time at home,” says Loewentheil. His collection includes casual pants and house slippers, though the slippers had to be cut from the exhibit for preservation reasons. On display is Kerouac’s glass ashtray, still with remnants of cigarette ash, described in the exhibit notes as evoking “Kerouac bent over a typewriter, extinguishing cigarette after cigarette in a smoky aura of creation”.
There’s a handwritten work schedule from April 1953 logging Kerouac’s hours and pay as a brakeman, which the exhibition frames as proof of the “working-class reality behind the mythology”. This framing feels true and resonant: Kerouac was raised working-class in Lowell, a French-Canadian mill town, and took odd manual labour jobs all his life. Even at the height of his fame, he depended on advances and sporadic income. In the latter part of his life, as his alcoholism worsened, most historians note that his finances grew ever more precarious, even as he became a household name.
Perhaps the most intimate item in the exhibit is Kerouac’s tobacco pouch, Loewentheil’s favourite. It still contains coarse tobacco leaf and was likely carried in Kerouac’s pocket.
“I treasure his personal objects,” says Loewentheil. “But I also feel, for lack of a better word, a little weird about owning another person’s physical, tangible things.” Manuscripts and books are one thing, but it feels “bizarre” to him to hold “a mala bead Kerouac was praying with and not feel a little invasive”.
That sense of voyeurism is palpable in the show and the book. It’s a delicate line to walk. Kerouac expected his letters would be pored over, but at 18, writing to a friend back home, he’s still “expressing private thoughts”. To address this, Loewentheil chose pages that show “who Kerouac was” without being “unnecessarily invasive”.
One slightly disappointing example of that approach: “Not every visitor needs to read his graphic depictions of his college sex.” So those aren’t shown.
There are present-day concerns. “Kerouac uses, at times, quite objectionable language” and “says things that are difficult to square with modern sensibilities”. The book notes Kerouac’s antisemitism, which persisted even as he befriended Jewish peers like Ginsberg.
Then, everybody’s favorite subject: Kerouac’s sexuality. Loewentheil laughs: “We all want to know what he was doing in the bedroom and who was there.” In the book, he writes that “evidence from Kerouac’s own journals, texts, and letters … suggested that he was deeply repressed or perhaps bisexual”. Even so, the “desire to categorise him is a mistake”, Loewentheil feels, and he resists the idea that any label can contain Kerouac.
Even so, it would undoubtedly mean a great deal to LGBTQ+ readers to claim an American icon, but Loewentheil believes even such an extensively confessional and self-mythologising figure as Kerouac deserves some mystery and privacy, perhaps particularly in his own struggles and conflicts. “Out of respect to Kerouac, I don’t think there’s a category for us to place him in. If he was never sure, how can we be?”
Perhaps the greatest tension in Kerouac’s life is between his Catholic upbringing and adult Buddhist study. This lives in the exhibit, too. Kerouac’s rosary, worn around his neck, is on display with his mala beads, used in Buddhist meditation.
The timing of this exhibit feels resonant – and a bit ominous. In January, news broke that Kerouac’s 37-metre-long first-draft scroll of On the Road will be up for auction. When it was last for sale in 2001, Carolyn Cassady – Neal Cassady’s former wife – denounced the auction as “blasphemy”, saying the scroll belonged in a library, not a private collection. “Jack loved public libraries,” she said at the time, adding: “If they auction it, anybody rich could buy it and keep it out of sight”.
Regarding the upcoming sale of the scroll, Loewentheil says: “The On the Road scroll is not just a manuscript; it’s a foundational document of postwar American literature. I hope it finds a home with a steward who appreciates its significance and will allow it to remain part of the ongoing public conversation around Kerouac.”
The exhibit makes a compelling case for separating an artist’s stereotype and mythos from their lived self, though Kerouac makes such separation tricky, and perhaps ultimately impossible. His work rides a genre-breaking line between nonfiction and fiction, making it challenging for historians to tease out truth from embellishment. His life was the work.
But the ongoing effort to reveal him brings beautiful things and, Loewentheil hopes, revives interest in a 20th-century icon whose star has arguably fallen among younger readers. From the letters, Loewentheil believes we can soften the popular image of the author: through a modern lens, he’s a more fitting example of non-toxic masculinity than a reckless postwar cowboy. The letters prove he was romantic and, ultimately, conservative. “People have a rugged idea of Kerouac, but that macho vibe is not so accurate,” says Loewentheil. “He had an enormous open heart”, and, “on a certain level, he was too gentle and nice a person for the world he was in”.
