Scroll down to calendar below for complete listing of events. 

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Events for the 2009 are listed by month. Scroll down for the month you want to check. Look ahead to see if there is any Kerouac event coming to a city near you.

 

 

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"And this was really the way that my whole road experience began, and the things that were to come are too fantastic not to tell."     

--Jack Kerouac, On the Road

ON THE ROAD Scroll Tour Continues

Dec. 14 – January 29, 2009: Birmingham, England – University of Birmingham

Saturday, January 10, 2009: JACK'S LAST CALL- (Say Goodbye to Kerouac) Written by PATRICK FENTON. JOHNSON THEATER, Saturday, January 10, 2009, 7:00pm, Suggested Donation $5

The drinking, the fame that grew after On the Road was published, the differences with his family, these parts of Jack Kerouac’s life, which made him a cultural icon of the American 50’s, are well known to many. But there is another part of Kerouac that only a few villagers from the quiet hamlet of Northport on Long Island had the chance to see up close. This is the Kerouac presented in Patrick Fenton’s play, JACK’S LAST CALL (Say Goodbye to Kerouac.)
 
     It is the end of the summer in 1964, a major cultural shift is starting to happen, and on his last night in Northport, Long Island, the America Kerouac saw through a rear view mirror along side of Neal Cassady is slowly playing again in his mind. While wondering back on his road days, he receives a series of soul--searching phone calls from his daughter Jan.

 February 2009

 March 2009

Jack Kerouac's Birthday, March 12, 1922

 April 2009

 May 2009

 June 2009

 July 2009

 August 2009

 September 2009

 October 2009

Jack Safe in Heaven dead, October 21, 1969

 November 2009

 December 2009

Please email your Kerouac and beat event to:  kerouaczin@aol.com or write to: A. Gyenis, DHARMA beat, PO Box 5174, Eureka, CA 95502-5174. I also appreciate copies of any publicity information for the DHARMA beat archive. Please include date, time, address, and contact. We try to maintain a complete list of Kerouac events. Thanks. 

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This is a look at Kerouac events dating back to 2001

Kerouac's 'On the Road' scroll begins museum tour

RYAN LENZ, Associated Press Writer

(01-13) 19:58 PST INDIANAPOLIS (AP) --

Like the trip that inspired it, the first draft of author Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" is a wandering narrative, told in a continuous block of text.

Yellowed with age, smudged with editing marks and the author's own ink-covered fingerprints, the scroll rolls over nearly 120 feet of paper. It is a relic of a literary phenomenon.

Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay bought the scroll two years ago for $2.43 million. Now that it has been displayed in Indianapolis, Irsay plans to send what may be the Beat Generation's quintessential text back to the road where it came from.

Beginning this week at the Orange County History Center in Orlando, Fla., and ending with a three-month stay at the New York Public Library in 2007, Kerouac's "On the Road" scroll will make a 13-stop, four-year national tour of museums and libraries.

"My goal all along was to have it and share it with all those who want to see it, whether it's in this country or other countries," Irsay said in an interview with The Associated Press.

In a conversation after he brought the scroll with director Cameron Crowe and journalist Hunter S. Thompson, Irsay said they discussed the manuscript's continued relevance as a chronicle of American discovery.

Kerouac wrote the novel in a coffee-saturated, 21-day typewriter marathon at a friend's apartment in New York City in 1951. When finally published six years later, it won critical acclaim as an unconventional masterpiece, defining a post-World War II generation of intellectual outlaws on an aimless odyssey across the American landscape.

But while some -- including The New York Times -- praised its publication, others dismissed it. "That's not writing. That's typing," author Truman Capote said in a review of Kerouac's book.

"It's the way that it was written that, in many ways, is more important than what it really is," said Howard Collinson, director of the University of Iowa Museum of Art, which will show the entire scroll in 2005. "That it kind of just spewed out of him is what it's all about."

When Kerouac died, his estate was reportedly valued at less than $100. The scroll passed hands and wound up in the New York Public Library. It's a storied life for a rough draft of a classic, said Steven Taylor, chair of writing and poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo.

"There's a long, long tradition of displaying literary artifacts that are treasured," said Taylor, who collaborated with beat poet Allen Ginsberg on numerous projects. "But the stream of consciousness, jump-cut, rapid motion of the book will not be as strange as it was to readers a generation ago."

Irsay and Kerouac share connections -- Kerouac was a star football player in Lowell, Mass., during high school and played briefly at Columbia University in New York. But Irsay is a businessman.

Still, buying the scroll and sending it on tour has little to do with profit, he said. Some museums are paying only a minor fee to display the scroll, mostly to cover the cost of shipping.

"It certainly wasn't something where I'm going to buy this because someday it will go up in value or I'm going to buy this because I want to sit and look at it," Irsay said. "I was drawn towards it."

Irsay, a guitarist with a liking for electric Bob Dylan, helped produce "Colors," a tribute to Ryan White, a boy with AIDS whose legal struggle to attend a school in Indiana became a national cause in 1985; White died in 1990 at the age of 18.

Irsay inherited the Colts in 1997 when his father passed away. At 44, he is the NFL's youngest team owner.

The scroll, which was once thought to have been stored in a dorm room closet, exchanged hands often after Kerouac's death in 1969. It had been part of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library until the 2001 auction, which was held to pay for debts in Kerouac's estate.

But as frequently as the scroll passed hands during its 53 years, Irsay, who thinks of himself more as the steward for the scroll than its owner, said perhaps it is fitting for it to leave him.

"Possessions I hold very lightly in the sense that they're kind of like very temporary borrowings," he said. "This will be someone else's and someone else's."

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