Librarians and Archivists on Jack Kerouac
Archivists from NYPL's Berg Collection and Emory's Rose Library discuss the challenges of preserving and interpreting Kerouac's papers across two major collections. Free.
Why we picked this
The people who actually handle Kerouac's notebooks, letters, and scroll drafts talk about what it's like to preserve them — and what the material reveals that the published work doesn't. A rare look at literary history from the inside of the archive.
Most discussions of Jack Kerouac focus on the published novels. This panel goes behind them, bringing together the archivists who manage the two most significant collections of Kerouac’s unpublished material. Carolyn Vega and Michael Inman from NYPL’s Berg Collection and Elizabeth Ott and Randy Gue from Emory University’s Rose Library discuss the practical and intellectual challenges of working with Kerouac’s papers — drafts, letters, notebooks, ephemera — spread across institutions.
The conversation covers preservation methodology, how researchers use the collections, and what the archivists themselves have observed in the material that doesn’t make it into scholarly literature. There’s a version of Kerouac that lives in the archive — in the revisions, the false starts, the correspondence — that differs considerably from the Kerouac of legend, and these are the people who know it best.
Hosted at the Grolier Club, New York’s preeminent bibliophilic society, this free panel is part of a larger Kerouac symposium and offers something genuinely rare: the scholar’s perspective replaced by the archivist’s — quieter, more granular, and often more illuminating.