Running Through Heaven: Visions of Jack Kerouac

With only three weeks left, don't miss the exhibition Running through Heaven: Visions of Jack Kerouac at the Grolier Club in New York. The exhibition explores Kerouac’s life and career in approximately 60 objects from his childhood in Lowell, Massachusetts to his death in 1969 at just 47 years old. The books and objects on view are all from the personal collection of Jacob Loewentheil, who has also carefully curated the selection. 

Upon entering the club, I was struck by a presentation copy with a full-page inscription in dark blue ink of Kerouac's first novel, The Town and the City. This and other presentation copies in the show are remarkable enough, but there is much to see and learn about the author long before his first novel was published. Raised in a French-Canadian home, Kerouac was an inveterate reader in both French and English, and early letters abound. Entering the main gallery, we are shown an incredible association piece, Kerouac's copy of Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1871 novel The Possessed, in which Kerouac has written out a quote from the book “as if they were all running through heaven," which inspired the exhibition’s title. Mystical, poetic, and visionary language came to define Kerouac's writing once he developed his prose style, but not to be missed is an early detective story written by a young Kerouac in the style of Dashiell Hammet or Raymond Chandler which opens with “The driving rain lashed the empty streets, thunder roared, and lightening flashed angrily.” This early effort is completed by an original illustration of a dark figure on an abandoned street. Following stints as a brakeman on the rails, at sea in the merchant marine, and playing football on a scholarship to Columbia, Kerouac famously hit the road and that is where his true literary style took root. 

After The Town and the City was published in 1950, Kerouac traveled widely and labored over the typescript scroll of the novel that became On the Road, which was not published until 1957. A highlight of the show is Kerouac's own stamped copy of On the Road as well as an inscribed copy of its Zen Buddhist follow up The Dharma Bums. From 1957 until his death, Kerouac battled being known as the "King of the Beats." He bore the brundt of all the positive and negative that came with the movement and, while he continued to write and publish novels and poems, many of which are excellent, the success of On the Road was never fully recreated. 

In a final display case are items that truly resonate with any Kerouac fan: a large glass ashtray and tobacco pouch, the first with black ash and the second with unused tobacco. While certainly not fresh after 60 years, the idea of Kerouac's last unsmoked cigarette is as optimistic as what might be around the next bend on the road. Sadly, the final photograph is one of many taken of Kerouac by his great friend, the poet Allen Ginsberg. It was taken the last time Jack came to visit him in New York. Hunkered down in a chair with his hat and jacket on and his suitcase at his feet, Jack is visibly intoxicated to the point of illness and looks like he is having a very bad time. It is sad to see the king this way, outmoded by his younger and healthier beat friends. While Kerouac peaked in the late 1950s, in the 1960s Ginsberg had a tremendous career in poetry and political activism. Even Neal Cassady, once the inspiration for Dean Moriarty in On the Road, had a final act as a Merry Prankster and spent the late ‘60s driving the “Furthur” bus and attending Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests. But poor Jack, or Ti Jean as he was known as a child, lived out his final year with his mother, his cats, his sherry and brandy, in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he died in 1969. Gone but never forgotten, I hope he's running through heaven right now. 

Running through Heaven: Visions of Jack Kerouac

On view through May 16, 2026 at

The Grolier Club
47 East 60th Street
New York, NY 10022