‘We all want to know what he was doing in the bedroom’: Kerouac’s unseen archive goes on show in New York

As the original On the Road scroll heads to auction, a new exhibition uncovers the private life of the Beat legend

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mong 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.