The January 2011 edition of Vanity Fair is on the news stand. It’s not magazine I normally purchase, but one of our readers sent an email reporting that in the issue’s cover story which is an interview with actor Johnny Depp by rock and roll star Patti Smith, Depp mentions a visit he once made to Lowell. While a summary of the Depp story is on the magazine’s website, the full story is not yet online. Here’s what Depp says about our city:

Smith: Speaking of books, I was thinking about the letters and manuscripts you have – Dylan Thomas, Kerouac, Rimbaud. Can you remember the first of these that you obtained and how that came about?

Depp: It was 1991, and I was finishing a film called Arizona Dream in New York. And I wanted to take a trip to Lowell, Massachusetts, to see Kerouac’s town. I’d read everything and been inundated with the Kerouac thing. And so I went there and hooked up with John Sampas, who is Kerouac’s wife’s brother. We talked. He took me around the town. We went to various bars and went to his house, spent a couple of days like that.

Depp gets into more detail about his stop in Lowell. We’ll watch for the arrival of the piece on the magazine’s website and will link to it when it appears.