What Jack Kerouac Left Behind

What Gets KeptMore than half a century after “On the Road,” Jack Kerouac is still a literary celebrity. But fame undid the man I knew.May 23, 2026Jack Kerouac and Joyce Johnson, in Greenwich Village.Photograph by Jerome Yulsman / Globe Photos / ZUMA / ShutterstockA glass ashtray—the kind you used to find often in American households—was recently on exhibit in the second-floor gallery of the Grolier Club. It was in a display case, ashes and all. If you had seen it on a coffee table, you might have thought that the smoker had just left the room, and could still be somewhere close by. But the ashes were fifty-six years old; they must have dropped from a cigarette Jack Kerouac was smoking the day he died, unexpectedly, in St. Petersburg, Florida, at the age of forty-seven. Born poor, he died broke, with his books out of fashion, although he was still a household name.When I saw the ashes, I wondered who had found them. Was it Jack’s third wife, Stella, who couldn’t bear to throw them out? Or was it his mother who insisted on keeping them? He called her Mémère; she and Jack’s father had been born in Quebec and had raised him in a French-speaking enclave of Lowell, Massachusetts. Mémère was a woman who saved things—a bit of string, a quarter of an onion, the accumulating boxes of papers that her son left in her keeping while he set out to know the country where he felt only half American.The ashes, carefully sealed up somehow, were evidently added to everything else that got packed in 1969, from a pair of Jack’s pajama bottoms—also destined to become a collector’s item—to the iconic scroll of “On the Road,” which was recently sold at Christie’s, purchased by the country singer Zach Bryan, for twelve million dollars, one of the highest sums ever paid for a literary manuscript. All of it got shipped north and stored for years in a barn in Lowell, where Jack’s brother-in-law, John Sampas, kept the used furniture that he sold in flea markets. When Stella died, in 1990, her family made Sampas Jack’s literary executor.

During the next four decades, he sold Jack’s personal belongings and portions of his archive to dealers and collectors.The ashes were acquired by the archivist and bookseller Jacob Loewentheil, who, about fifteen years ago, bought Jack’s copy of Dostoyevsky’s “The Possessed.” As he looked at the passages Jack had underlined, he felt a profound connection to him and a desire to collect other things that would give him “a tangible link to Kerouac,” as he put it. No doubt some of the visitors to the Grolier felt the thrill of propinquity as they looked at the remains of one of Jack’s last cigarettes, but, for me, they were reminders of his absence, and the lasting strangeness of his fame, and how his kisses always tasted of Lucky Strikes.I have my own Kerouac collection. It starts with the red-and-black-checked shirt that he told me to look for when I met him on a blind date one January night in 1957. Even without it I would have noticed him right away as he sat at the front counter of the Howard Johnson’s in Greenwich Village. He was so arrestingly good-looking, with his black hair and blue eyes, and the ruddy complexion of someone who couldn’t be contained within the walls of a New York apartment. No one else looks like that, I thought.I was twenty-one. On a shelf at the literary agency where I was working as a secretary, I’d recently found a copy of Jack’s first novel, “The Town and the City.” I’d stayed up all night reading it, with the feeling that it was reading me, that I could have been one of the characters trying out some new, free way to live after leaving home. I studied the author photo on the back cover: John Kerouac, age twenty-seven, with a necktie and a neatly pressed jacket and a serious, slightly melancholy expression. The photo had been taken seven years earlier. He had written eight unpublished books since then, and lived much closer to the edge.My arrival at the Howard Johnson’s seemed to have interrupted his train of thought. After I sat down, he let me know that solitude was what he was craving most at that moment. He’d spent the past summer as a fire lookout on a mountain out West called Desolation Peak. “

I wish I was there now,” he said, his eyes on my face. I wondered if he always told people exactly what he was thinking.He ordered me a cup of coffee, but when it came he said, with some embarrassment, that I’d have to pay for it—he had bought a pack of Luckies with his last twenty dollars and had been badly shortchanged. I guessed he hadn’t eaten, so I offered to buy him a meal; I’d never bought anyone a meal in my life. He ordered the cheapest dish on the menu, frankfurters and beans. Then we sat at the counter talking, mostly about books. I got up the nerve to tell him that I’d started working on a novel. To my surprise, that interested him—most men wouldn’t have wanted to hear about it. He laughed when I told him I loved Henry James, and said I needed new influences. By the time he suggested we go uptown to my place, I found myself saying, “If you wish.” As we walked out into the street, he put on a shabby brown leather jacket that looked as if it had been through a lot, in many different places.Once, I asked him how old the jacket was, and he said he’d got it during the war, when he first shipped out as a merchant seaman. In “The Town and the City,” he described that voyage on “a great proud bark back from homeless seas,” but I only learned decades later, from Jack’s journals, that he’d signed on as a scullion, and sailed on the S.S. Dorchester. The ship carried hundreds of construction workers who were heading to Greenland to build an airfield, and Jack, who was then on a break from Columbia University, scrubbed pots and peeled potatoes in a galley run by three Black cooks. He wrote about each of them: the one who kept finding fault with his work and called him Stupid; the one named Glory, whom he considered a born leader; and the gay pastry chef, who conducted religious services on deck. It was the pastry chef who had offered Jack the warm leather jacket, insisting that he keep it.Six months later, in February, 1943, most of the men Jack sailed with that summer—including Glory and the pastry chef—were killed when the Dorchester was torpedoed by a German U-boat.

More than six hundred people died. Jack was so shattered by the news that his hands shook for weeks afterward. I remember him wearing the leather jacket even after he became famous and could have afforded a new one. I wonder if it reminded him of what Buddhists call the void. We were all heading there, he told me more than once, though he knew I didn’t like to hear about that.The week before our blind date, Jack’s previous girlfriend had thrown him out of her apartment, on the advice of her psychiatrist, so he was in serious need of a place to stay, as he had often been during his travels. Since I happened to be a young woman with an apartment of her own—something of a rarity in those days—Allen Ginsberg, whom I’d recently got to know, had arranged for us to meet. My two haphazardly furnished rooms were in a brownstone a couple of blocks from Columbia. The windows looked out on a back yard where generations of bedsprings rusted and a tree of heaven grew. Just before we stepped inside, he pulled me close and kissed me. “I don’t like blondes,” he murmured, which I thought was too ridiculous to take seriously. By the time we’d left the subway and his arm dropped around me as we walked along Broadway, it was clear that we were going to be friends, whatever else we might be to each other.I had just survived a bad breakup and a really awful year, which should have made me cautious. Instead, I had a nothing-to-lose feeling. The next day, Jack moved into my apartment with a zippered sports bag that he picked up from the cheap hotel on Eighth Street where he’d been staying. It contained a notebook and a couple of changes of clothes, mostly from the Salvation Army.I knew he’d be leaving as soon as he got his first five-hundred-dollar check for “On the Road,” which Viking Press was finally going to publish after three years of maddening indecision. Still, by the time Jack boarded a freighter, six weeks later, it was hard to say goodbye. I remember trying not to show it, because I knew he didn’t want to carry any weight as he moved through the world. When I began writing him letters full of news about my life in New York, I hesitated before typing “Love” above my name.

We spent our last night together in Jack’s cabin aboard the S.S. Slovenia. It was an experience he wanted me to have—he knew I was afraid my life would never give me enough to write about, and he’d been urging me to do some travelling of my own. The ship was still docked in Brooklyn, but I could feel the cabin gently rocking as the East River moved under us. Early the next morning, as I walked to the subway through the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Jack was on his way to Tangier, to visit William Burroughs. From there he would go to Paris, where he was thinking about living for the rest of his life.He’d forgotten to pack his red-and-black shirt. I hung it in the closet, wondering if I’d see him again. Three weeks later, I opened my mailbox and found a letter. “We had a tremendous storm 500 miles out & almost foundered,” Jack wrote. He was currently eight miles off the coast of Africa, looking forward to landing in Tangier, “the Blue Pearl of the Hesperides—the city of vice!” He told me that he’d spent the voyage studying history and reading Kierkegaard in his cabin and that, since he hadn’t been drinking, he was now the healthy Jack I’d never known. “We’ll meet again,” he promised.In his next letter, he wrote about walking through the casbah, the “whanging music” he heard, the cafés where marijuana was smoked openly. It sounded like the kind of adventure he’d imagined. But two weeks later he was wishing he hadn’t come—too many “dull expatriate characters” and “not too many good vibrations.” “Lonely here,” he wrote. “Don’t like whores anyway and no girls speak English.” Had he forgotten to whom he was writing? Or was it that he felt there was nothing he couldn’t tell me?Before March was over, he’d left for Paris. I wrote him twice, care of American Express. A month went by with no response. I kept telling myself not to wait for him, but I waited. One day near the end of April, I received a cable: Jack was on an ocean liner back to America and asked if he could stay with me. “