Introduction

The exhibition on view in the Melba Remig Saltarelli Room in Wilson Library provides a glimpse into the life and literary career of Jack Kerouac, one of the most widely read and influential American writers of the 1950s and 1960s. His many publications, especially the novel On the Road (1957), marked him in the popular imagination as the chief spokesman for the dissatisfied and alienated elements among the youth of the time, those for whom Kerouac himself invented the label “the Beat Generation.” Despite his often repeated objections, he also came to be seen by many as one of the founding fathers of the countercultural movements that emerged out of the Beat phenomenon in the late 1960s. A highly controversial figure in his lifetime, Kerouac’s stature has soared in the decades since his death, and his writings have entered the canon of late-twentieth-century American literature.

In exploring the life of Kerouac, the exhibition also seeks to show something of the range and depth of the holdings in Wilson Library that document the literary and cultural avant-garde of the post-World War II period in American history. Concentrated largely in the Rare Book Collection (RBC), these holdings are in a variety of formats, including books, periodicals, broadsides, manuscripts, photographs, and audiovisual materials. Although the foundations have been laid over a period of several decades, much of the depth of our current strength has been developed over the past ten years, most notably with the additions of the Grove Press Collection and the Beat Literature Collection. The former is a collection of the imprints of the major publisher of the avant-garde from 1945 to 1980; the latter is a grouping of separate collections focused around individual writers or publishers associated with the Beat literary movement. The resulting Kerouac holdings, already impressive, gained further in depth and uniqueness with the 2004 acquisition of the papers of the novelist’s first wife, Edie Parker, and of his lifelong friend, Henri Cru. Most of these materials were purchased with funds from the William A. Whitaker Endowment. Others have been acquired as gifts, most notably from Bill Morgan of New York City.

We are indebted to many outside the Rare Book Collection for their support in the preparation and assembly of this exhibition. We want to express our special appreciation to the Allen Ginsberg Trust for permission to use a number of Ginsberg’s photographs of Kerouac that appear both in our display and in the printed exhibition brochure. Similarly, we want to thank scholar and photographer John Cohen for his generosity in allowing us to reproduce two of his photographs of Kerouac and his friends, made during the filming of Robert Frank’s classic 1959 Beat film, Pull My Daisy. We also wish to thank the Manuscripts Department, the North Carolina Collection, the Imaging and Photographic Services, and the Conservation Department, all of Wilson Library, for the use of their collections and/or services in the preparation of this exhibition. Finally, we wish to express our thanks to James S. Irsay of Indianapolis, Indiana, for the opportunity to display his remarkable original scroll manuscript of Kerouac’s On the Road alongside the materials drawn from our own collections.

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