Jack Kerouac, the French-speaking boy from Lowell whose On the Road scroll sold for $12 million

Jack Kerouac

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	March 12, 1922 Lowell, Massachusetts, United States
Died	October 21, 1969 (47)
Occupation	Novelist and poet
Known for	Take Your Pills

A roll of tracing paper more than a hundred feet long, its sheets trimmed and taped end to end so the typist never had to stop for a fresh page, now holds the record as the most expensive literary manuscript ever sold at auction. Jack Kerouac typed On the Road on it, single-spaced, with no paragraph breaks. Its new owner is a country singer who wants to take it home to the Massachusetts mill town where Kerouac grew up speaking French.

The scroll came up at Christie’s in the sale of the late Jim Irsay’s collection; the Indianapolis Colts owner had bought it a quarter of a century earlier, for what was then a record of its own. The buyer, Zach Bryan, also took the typescript scroll of The Dharma Bums and a bundle of Kerouac’s letters to his friend Ed White. Everything is meant for the Jack Kerouac Center that Bryan is building inside the former Saint Jean Baptiste Church in Lowell, where Kerouac served as an altar boy and where his funeral Mass was said.

The hammer came down at $12,135,000, three times the top of the estimate of $2.5 million to $4 million, against the $2.43 million Irsay had paid. That price says something about what the book still does to people. A personal copy of the first edition was on show this spring at the Grolier Club in New York, in Running Through Heaven: Visions of Jack Kerouac, about 60 letters, photographs and keepsakes from the collection of Jacob Loewentheil. The Grolier Club’s notes put it plainly: the novel fixed his image as the voice of a rebellious generation, “a reputation he grew to loathe.” The show also had the small framed portrait of his older brother Gerard that Kerouac often carried with him.

Recommended ReadingHerman Melville, the customs inspector who had already written the great American novel

He was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac in Lowell on March 12, 1922, the son of French-Canadian parents, Léo-Alcide Kéroack and Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque. French was the language of the house; English arrived at about six, and full confidence only in his late teens. Gerard died as a child, and the loss ran through everything Kerouac wrote afterwards.

Football was the way out. A scholarship offer took him to Columbia University in 1940, where he broke a leg in his first season, fell out with the coach, Lou Little, and drifted away from Columbia. He shipped out with the Merchant Marine in 1942. The Naval Reserve kept him eight days in 1943 before discharging him on psychiatric grounds, with a diagnosis of “schizoid personality.”

Back in New York he fell in with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and, later, a fast-talking drifter from Denver called Neal Cassady. In 1944 Lucien Carr, another friend from that circle, stabbed David Kammerer to death; Kerouac helped get rid of the evidence, was held as a material witness and married Edie Parker so her family would pay his bail. He and Burroughs turned the case into a novel, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, which waited until 2008 for a publisher. His actual debut, The Town and the City, came out in 1950 under the name John Kerouac and sold poorly.

Then came the scroll. In April 1951, in an apartment at 454 West 20th Street in Manhattan, he typed the first draft of On the Road in about three weeks, working from the conviction that prose should move like a jazz solo, unrevised. Cassady became Dean Moriarty, Ginsberg became Carlo Marx, and Kerouac himself was the narrator, Sal Paradise. It took six years and a string of rejections to reach print. When Viking Press finally issued an edited version on September 5, 1957, Gilbert Millstein wrote in The New York Times that it was “the most beautifully executed, the clearest, and the most important utterance yet made” by the generation Kerouac had named “beat.”

Fame arrived all at once, and so did the backlog. Books written in the lean years appeared in a rush: The Subterraneans and The Dharma Bums in 1958, the second a Buddhist mountain-climbing novel built around the poet Gary Snyder; Doctor Sax and Maggie Cassidy, both set in Lowell, in 1959, the same year as the jazz-rhythm poems of Mexico City Blues, 242 “choruses” long. Tristessa and Lonesome Traveler followed in 1960. Big Sur (1962) is the bleakest of them, the record of an alcoholic crack-up on the California coast, and Visions of Gerard (1963) finally gave his brother a book. Desolation Angels came in 1965. He thought of these autobiographical novels as one long work, the Duluoz Legend.

The celebrity sat badly on him. Reporters wanted the king of the beatniks, and he wanted to be read as a novelist. He drank harder, lived mostly with his mother and in 1966 married Stella Sampas, the sister of a Lowell boyhood friend. On October 21, 1969, he died in a hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, of an internal hemorrhage caused by cirrhosis. He was 47. He is buried in Edson Cemetery in Lowell. His only child, the writer Jan Kerouac, born in 1952 to his second wife, Joan Haverty, was acknowledged by him only after a blood test years later.

The screen has kept circling him. He narrated Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s short film Pull My Daisy in 1959, and MGM made The Subterraneans the following year. Walter Salles finally filmed On the Road in 2012, with Sam Riley as Sal and Garrett Hedlund as Dean; Michael Polish’s Big Sur followed in 2013 with Jean-Marc Barr as Kerouac, and Kill Your Darlings the same year went back to the Carr killing. Viking published the unedited text, real names and all, as On the Road: The Original Scroll in 2007, and the University of Massachusetts Lowell gave him an honorary doctorate that year.

Lowell holds its Kerouac fall festival from October 8 to 12, with readings and walking tours of the streets he wrote about. The scroll, meanwhile, is headed for the church where the town said goodbye to him.

Tags: novelists, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Beat Generation, Big Sur, On the Road

More Like This

Jack London, the oyster pirate who wrote the wild into American fiction

Philip K. Dick, the writer who turned paranoia into prophecy

Robin Williams: the comedy that ran faster than anyone could follow

Personal Journals, Manuscripts, And An Archive Of Letters From Literary Giant John Steinbeck To Be Auctioned At Bonhams This October

Edgar Allan Poe, the writer who invented detective fiction and left his own death unsolved

Original Bob Dylan Lyrics to Be Offered for Auction at Sotheby’s