Jack Kerouac in the Collections of Wilson Library

Within Wilson Library, the Rare Book Collection (RBC) houses nearly all of the holdings relating to Jack Kerouac. The RBC does not itself, however, have a separate or distinct Kerouac collection. Instead, materials by or about the Beat novelist are scattered throughout the department’s holdings, with most concentrated in one of three locations: the Beat Literature Collection, the Grove Press Collection, and the general holdings of the RBC (under Kerouac’s Library of Congress call number). The materials have come to the RBC from a wide variety of sources. Most have been acquired with income from the endowment established by William A. Whitaker for the acquisition of literary materials in the Rare Book Collection. Others have come as gifts through the generosity of many donors who, in recent years, have included Townsend Ludington, Benjamin J. Marks, John Moran, Tim Moran, and Bill Morgan.

Books and Periodicals

Viewed together, the RBC’s holdings of Jack Kerouac contain virtually all of the first as well as a significant percentage of subsequent editions of his works, including separately published books, pamphlets, and broadsides as well as books to which he contributed introductions, articles,

First edition of Kerouac’s The Town and the City (1950).
Checklist no. 8. stories, and poems. Both hardcover and paperback issues are collected, as are a growing number of translations. Consistent with the goal of developing a very full and comprehensive research collection, the Kerouac holdings range in scope from the most scarce editions and printings to very common imprints, both lifetime and posthumous. Among the rarities are fine copies of the first editions of The Town and the City (1950), On the Road (1957), Excerpts from Visions of Cody (1959), and a number of limited-issue broadsides, including Hymn—God Pray for Me (1959), Poem (1962), and A Pun for Al Gelpi (1966). Between 1958 and 1966, Kerouac published a number of books through Barney Rosset and his Grove Press in New York. The Grove Press Collection in the RBC contains Grove publisher Rosset’s own copy of The Subterraneans (1958), numbered as copy one in the limited issue of the first edition. The department also has the very scarce uncorrected page proofs of the Grove edition of Doctor Sax (1959). (Fuller bibliographical details on these and other works by Kerouac may be found in the appended exhibition checklist.)

Complementing these books, the RBC also has very extensive holdings of Kerouac’s magazine appearances. While sometimes neglected by collectors, these periodical appearances are important in a comprehensive research collection. They are part of an author’s publishing record and thus primary biographical as well as bibliographical

First Grove Press paperback edition of The Subterraneans (1958) and a later edition with an introduction by Henry Miller (1959).
Checklist nos. 15 and 16. evidence. Moreover, such publications often contain the first printings or alternative versions of a given piece. As such, they may provide insight into the evolution of an author’s intentions or meaning. As of July 2005, the earliest Kerouac periodical contribution in the collection is “Song: Fie My Fum,” which he co-authored with Allen Ginsberg and published in 1950 in the small but influential magazine Neurotica. Indeed, most of Kerouac’s periodical appearances in the early and mid-1950s were in similarly low-circulation, avant-garde publications. The RBC has complete or very full holdings of many of these, including Beatitude, Big Table, The Chicago Review, The City Lights Journal, Evergreen Review, Kulchur, Neurotica, The Paris Review, and Yugen. After the phenomenal success of On the Road in 1957, Kerouac’s literary agent, Sterling Lord, urged him to take advantage of his new fame and publish more in the mainstream media. Kerouac took Lord’s advice, expanding his range to include higher-circulation magazines, such as Escapade, Holiday, Pageant, and Playboy.

Manuscript Holdings

Manuscript holdings relating to Kerouac are concentrated in the collections of papers and other materials of two Kerouac associates, Edie Parker (1922-1993) and Henri Cru (1921-1992). Both were especially close to Kerouac during the 1940s in New York. Parker was Kerouac’s first wife and Cru a lifelong friend from Jack’s prep school days. Both appeared as characters in multiple Kerouac novels. The Parker and Cru papers together total about 1,700 items, occupying 6.5 linear feet of shelf space. The two collections were acquired in 2003 from Tim Moran, a close friend of both individuals. They are kept together, accessible through a joint finding aid as part of the Beat Literature Collection. An addition was made to the collection by John Moran, Tim’s brother, in 2004.

Edie Parker was introduced to Kerouac by Henri Cru in 1942. A student at Columbia, Parker shared a series of apartments with another student, Joan Vollmer, who would later marry William Burroughs. Their apartments, all near Columbia, became meeting places (and sometimes residences) for the small group of friends later to become the core of the Beat movement. Romantically involved from the outset, Kerouac and Parker married in 1944, but the relationship did not last. They formally separated in 1946, and the marriage was later annulled. In the decades following the novelist’s death, Parker wrote and spoke frequently about her time with

First edition of Excerpts from Visions of Cody (1959). The complete text was published posthumously in 1972. See Checklist nos. 23 and 24. him and her friendships with others in the early New York group. She appeared as a character in three of Kerouac’s novels: The Town and the City (1950), Visions of Cody (1959 and 1972), and Vanity of Duluoz (1968).

Parker’s papers contain a number of original Kerouac pieces, including several holograph poems and a handful of the letters he wrote to her. Of equal interest and greater rarity are the letters written to Parker, mainly during the Columbia years, by friends of Edie and Jack and by Kerouac family members. They include letters from a number of the other important women in Kerouac’s life, including Edie’s apartment mates Joan Vollmer and Celine Young, and Kerouac’s mother and sister. Correspondents from the period after Kerouac’s death in 1969 include Carolyn Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. Parker appears to have assembled these pieces along with an abundance of photographs, news clippings, and other printed materials to support both her public presentations on Kerouac and the writing of her memoirs. The original manuscript and several later revisions of these memoirs are among the papers in the collection. Henri Cru became friends with Kerouac in 1939 when they were both prep school students at Horace Mann in New York. Although Cru did not follow Kerouac to Columbia, the two remained friends. Cru was the first to know Edie Parker, and he introduced her to Kerouac before shipping out on his first merchant marine ship in 1942. Cru stayed in the merchant marine until his retirement in the 1980s, living both in New York and on the West Coast. He and Kerouac remained friends until the latter’s death in 1969. An invitation to visit Cru was, in fact, the occasion for Kerouac’s first trip to San Francisco and the West Coast, a visit described in detail in On the Road. Cru figured in this book as Remi Boncoeur and in four other Kerouac novels as Deni Bleu. In the late 1970s, Cru renewed his friendship with Parker, and the two remained in close contact until the former merchant seaman’s death in 1992.

The Cru materials in the collection are not nearly as extensive as those of Parker. Probably the most important single piece is an undated six-page typescript summarizing a screenplay, “Blood and Paper or Lunchtime Wake,” that Cru and Kerouac worked on together but never completed. Within the small file of correspondence (115 pieces), there are letters from Joan Haverty (Kerouac’s second wife), Jan Kerouac (Jack’s daughter by Haverty and his only child), and Edie Parker.

Graphic Materials, Ephemera, and Secondary Works

The Beat Literature Collection also contains nearly one hundred original photographs of the Beats and their friends. These include large prints of six photos of Kerouac taken by Allen Ginsberg, most of them with Ginsberg’s own handwritten annotations below the images. There are also prints of two fine images of Kerouac taken by John Cohen while he was the official still photographer for the 1959 filming of Robert Frank’s Pull My Daisy (for which Jack provided the voice-over narration). The Edie Parker papers contain numerous photographs, including a tintype portrait of a young Kerouac.

Kerouac first editions. Clockwise from upper left,
see Checklist nos. 35, 27, 18, and 31.

There are other graphic materials as well, among them a colorful set of theater cards and posters advertising the 1960 film production of The Subterraneans, as well as newsclippings and other ephemera. Finally, there are a large number of secondary works concerning Kerouac. Perhaps the most interesting— certainly the most unique—is a typescript of Bill Morgan’s The Beat Generation in New York: A Walking Tour of Jack Kerouac’s City (San Francisco: City Lights, 1997) with copious handwritten comments and suggestions scattered thoughout by poet, publisher, and Kerouac friend, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Related Holdings of Beat and Avant-Garde Materials in the Rare Book Collection

The Kerouac materials in the Rare Book Collection both support and are supported by the extensive and deep holdings of the department concerning the Beats, which number about 10,000 items in a wide variety of formats, primarily print but including original photographs, audiovisual materials, and manuscripts. The RBC’s holdings of published works by and about Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, originally acquired from Bill Morgan and now in the Beat Literature Collection, are possibly the strongest in the world. The RBC collections also have strong and growing depth in the writings of a range of other Beat and related avant-garde authors, including William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Michael McClure, Peter Orlovsky, Gary Snyder, and Anne Waldman. In collecting the American avant-garde, the RBC has also developed significant publisher’s imprint collections. The largest and most important is the remarkably comprehensive collection of the books of Barney Rosset’s Grove Press, acquired from the controversial publisher in 1995. Complementing the Grove Press Collection are the increasingly strong holdings of the publications of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books as well as a wide range of other, smaller avant-garde presses, including the Four Seasons Publications and the Grey Fox Press of Donald Allen, the Totem Press of LeRoi and Hettie Jones, the Poet’s Press of Diane di Prima, and the Olympia Press of Maurice Girodias. Finally, the RBC also has expanding holdings of contemporary popular fiction purporting to describe the Beat scene or characterize the Beat Generation (usually in a sensational manner and often negatively).

The Rare Book Collection’s holdings of Kerouac, the Beats, and their contemporaries among the American avant-garde constitute a scholarly resource of the first order, one of national and international significance. They provide a critical mass of original materials which will facilitate research on every level, from the undergraduate student to the most advanced scholar. We expect these collections to grow and to be increasingly important to our evolving understanding of American cultural and social history during the decades following World War II, and by extension, of the world we live in today.

All of the Kerouac holdings and most other related materials have been cataloged. They may be accessed through the online catalog of the University library.

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