The Kerouac Renaissance: From Lowell to the World

By Steve Edington—Lowell Celebrates Kerouac

The Jack Kerouac Commemorative at Bridge and French Streets was formally dedicated in the summer of 1988 two years after the organization, Lowell Celebrates Kerouac, was created to carry forth the idea of honoring Kerouac in his hometown.

I doubt few would have foreseen then that the 1988 Dedication would be the first of 36 consecutive annual Festivals in Lowell to honor the life and literary/cultural legacy of Jack Kerouac. This October of 2025 will be the 37^th annual Lowell Celebrates Kerouac Festival, thanks to the ongoing life and efforts of LCK. [A virtual on-line Festival was held in 2020 due to COVID, but it did happen.]

Early on the Festival dates were moved from the summer to October to reflect Kerouac’s well-known passage in On the Road that “Everybody goes home in October.” For all his many far-flung travels, Lowell always remained home for Jack Kerouac; and he went to his eternal home in October of 1969 when he passed away in St. Petersburg, Florida. He was then brought back to Lowell for a Funeral Mass at the St. Jean Baptiste Church where he had once served as an altar boy and then buried in Lowell’s Edson Cemetery.

I came on to the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac Committee over 30 years ago in 1994 and have served a couple of terms as its President. I am presently LCK’s Treasurer. What has been especially fascinating to me is how the growth and evolution of LCK has taken place in tandem with the Kerouac Renaissance—on a national and global level—that was gaining traction at around the same time that the Commemorative was dedicated.

Even as those of us with LCK worked on producing our Festivals from year to year, things were taking off in the larger Kerouac world as his true literary worth was coming to be recognized. The novels and books of poetry that he’d published in his lifetime, with some of them going out of print, came back to life.

Thanks to the efforts of the late John Sampas, who became the Literary Executor of the Kerouac Estate in the early 1990s, a whole genre of post-humous Kerouac writing was published. They included two volumes of his Selected Letters that ran from 1940 until his death in 1969. There was a coffee-table volume of his Buddhist writings called “Some of the Dharma.” There was “Atop an Underwood,” “The Haunted Life,” and the original version of the On the Road scroll, to cite but a few examples. The latter came after the OTR scroll manuscript was purchased in May of 2001 by James Irsay, the owner of the NFL franchise Indianapolis Colts, for just under 2.5 million dollars.

At the turn of the century and millennium The Modern Library ranked On the Road at number 55 of the top 100 American novels of the 20^th century; and Time Magazine rated it as one of the 100 best English language novels published between 1923 and 2005.

When John Sampas passed away in 2018, his nephew, Jim Sampas, became the Estate’s Literary Executor. Jim has continued in the practice of bringing previously unpublished Kerouac writings into print. In collaboration with Kerouac scholar Charles Shuttleworth, Charles and Jim have seen to the publication of Kerouac’s journal from his Desolation Peak experience in the summer of 1956, and to much of his previously unpublished journals on Buddhism. Jim and Sylvia Cunha—Director of Marketing and Development for the Kerouac Estate—have also brought out a collection of Kerouac’s sayings and maxims with the title “Truth and Beautiful Meaningful Lies.”

In the academic world Jack Kerouac has achieved the status and respect that he was denied in his lifetime and in the years immediately following his death. There are now courses in English Departments across the country on the life and writings of Kerouac and other Beat Generation writers. At the University of Pennsylvania Dr. Jean Christophe Cloutier has done some outstanding work and research on Kerouac’s use of the French-Canadian/Franco-American language in his writings—using much of Kerouac’s previously unpublished work. Here at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell there is a Jack and Stella Kerouac Center for American Studies in the UML English Department.

The UML Center for Lowell History has recently received, via Lowell Celebrates Kerouac, the archives of the late Roger Brunelle, one of the founders of LCK. Much of it deals with the origins of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac, the attention it has received from around the world, and much of the history of the organization itself.

On this note, we return to the theme of how Kerouac’s rising star in the larger literary, cultural, and academic worlds has parallelled the near-40-year history of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac. During these years our festivals have grown both in attendees and content. Over the first or second weekend in October people come from around the country and from various parts of the world to spend a weekend in the city where Kerouac’s road began.

The bus and walking tours we offer show the neighborhoods and parts of the City of Lowell that are described in Jack’s five Lowell-based novels from the 1920s and 30s. They include Kerouac’s birthplace on Lupine Road in Centralville, and his grave site at the Edson Cemetery. While we give due recognition to Kerouac’s road novels, our primary focus is on his Lowell roots and his French-Canadian ancestry, which come through quite clearly in Jack’s Lowell novels. Our musical events, open mics, and a poetry competition at Lowell High School all pay tribute to the ongoing Kerouac Spirit in his hometown.

In partnership with the Parker Lecture Series, we bring acclaimed Kerouac scholars to Lowell to offer their many and varied perspectives on Kerouac’s life and work. Among them have been Kerouac biographers Ann Charters and Dennis McNally, New York Times feature writer John Leland [“Why Kerouac Matters”], the aforementioned Dr. Cloutier and Charles Shuttleworth, filmmaker John Antonelli, as well as local poet and writer Paul Marion—a founder of LCK and keeper of much of the Kerouac lore of Lowell. We also work in tandem with the Kerouac Studies program at UML on a couple of pre-festival events on the campus as a way of connecting with Kerouac in academia.

Since the late 1990s one of the mainstays of our festivals has been the renowned composer and jazz artist David Amram, who brings his amazing musical talents, as well as his stories of his days with Kerouac in New York, to Lowell year after year. One of the highpoints of each festival is the Annual Amram Jam on Sunday afternoon. Those attending—always in a packed house—are invited to read a piece of their own work or a favorite Kerouac passage while David and his fellow musicians provide the musician accompaniment. This way, the readers can share their material while being accompanied by the same person who once provided the musical back-up for Kerouac when he read at some of New York’s jazz clubs in the late 1950s. David will be with us again this year in Lowell (2025) just a few weeks shy of his 95^th birthday!

In 2022, and the months leading up to it, LCK worked in collaboration with several other cultural and civic organizations in Lowell to observe the Jack Kerouac Centennial. Kerouac was born in 1922. We kicked off the Centennial on Kerouac’s birthday on March 12, wrapped it up with the October Festival, and LCK produced several other Kerouac themed events in the months in between. Once again, people came from all over America and several other countries to be a part of this observance.

What I find most remarkable in looking back over the ongoing and highly productive life of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac is that we do all we do as an all-volunteer organization with no paid staff and no office. We are very ably served and led by our current President, Mike Flynn. Our LCK Committee meets year-round to plan the October festival and put on some more low-key events for Kerouac’s birthday. We get our financial support from arts and cultural grants, income from the festivals, an annual appeal to donors, as well as some State funding thanks to Senator Ed Kennedy.

To return to what was noted at the beginning of this essay, I feel that the growth and success of our festivals has taken place in tandem with the larger Kerouac Renaissance. The two go hand in hand: As the Kerouac star keeps rising in the larger world, more and more people come to Lowell to honor his life and legacy. They, in turn, take their Kerouac/Lowell experience back to where they live to keep the Kerouac Spirit alive and growing wherever they may be.

One more late-breaking piece to this story:

In recent weeks the former St. Jean Baptiste Church was purchased from Lowell’s TMI Property Management and Development company by the Grammy winning country music singing star Zach Bryan to be converted into a Kerouac Center (actual name yet to be determined). As indicated above, the St. Jean Baptiste Church was once the heart and soul of Lowell’s French-Canadian community; and was the place where, during Father Armand “Spike” Morrissette’s ministry, Jack served as altar boy, and where “Father Spike” conducted his Funeral Mass.

The drive to convert the former St. Jean Baptiste Church into a Kerouac Center got underway some 3-4 years ago. Zach Bryan’s purchase of the building is an amazing boost to now making the Center a reality.

From an article in The Boston Globe about this development: “’[Zach] Bryan’s commitment to Kerouac’s legacy should go a long way toward ensuring that younger generations will engage with the writer’s work,’ said Jim Sampas, the literary executor of the Kerouac Estate.”

We at LCK are delighted with this development and are ready to lend our support in whatever ways we can. As the conversion of the St. Jean Baptiste Church goes forward, we will keep on keeping on with our annual festivals.

With a Kerouac Center in Lowell, along with the ongoing Lowell Celebrates Kerouac festivals, and the Kerouac Studies program at UML, Lowell, Massachusetts is well poised to be the Center of the Kerouac World!

Somewhere, Jack must be smiling.

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Steve Edington is the Minister Emeritus of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua, New Hampshire. He is a 30 year member, and a past President, of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac.

He is the author of “The Beat Face of God—The Beat Generation Writers as Spirit Guides,” “Kerouac’s Nashua Connection,” “Bring Your Own God—The Spirituality of Woody Guthrie” and “God Is Not God’s Name—A Journey Beyond Words.”

Steve grew up in West Virginia and is a 1967 graduate of Marshall University. He and his wife reside in Nashua.