What Jack Kerouac Left Behind

Jack Kerouac and Joyce Johnson, in Greenwich Village.Photograph by Jerome Yulsman / Globe Photos / ZUMA / Shutterstock Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story. A 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.