Kerouac’s unseen archive reframes the Beat myth

A new exhibition at New York’s Grolier Club, Running Through Heaven: Visions of Jack Kerouac, sets out to rehumanize the familiar image of the author — the open road, cigarette and postwar rebel — by showing letters and objects that have not been publicly displayed.

The curator and owner of the collection, Jacob Loewentheil, found the show’s title in a pencilled note inside Kerouac’s copy of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed: “as if they were all running through heaven.” Many items date from Kerouac’s Columbia years: letters home to Lowell that capture a young man whose world was suddenly metropolitan, experiments in what would become his “spontaneous prose,” and passages that would later feed On the Road.

The exhibition coincides with Loewentheil’s book of the same name, which includes a foreword by Ann Charters and presents the letters as evidence of a writer forming his voice while already convinced he would be famous.

United States, New York

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