UMass Lowell will feature Jack Kerouac’s personal items at a new exhibit
UMass Lowell will feature Jack Kerouac’s personal items at a new exhibit
On Thursday, Oct. 8, UMass Lowell will open the Kerouac Retrieved exhibit, featuring several of Jack Kerouac’s personal items.
The campus will display Kerouac’s wooden writer’s desk, cat carriers he fashioned from wood by hand, a favorite windbreaker from Lowell Tech (which is now part of UMass Lowell), and more. These items were retrieved by UMass Lowell professors Todd Tietchen and Michael Millner from Kerouac’s home in St. Petersburg, Florida — his last residence before his death in 1969. The two were invited to the house by John Sampas, brother of Kerouac’s late wife, Stella, and executor of the Kerouac literary estate.
“There was something uncanny – something simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar – about moving through the house that Jack moved through, touching the daily objects of life that Jack touched and used,’’ said Millner in a news release. “We left Jack’s house with a different sense of him as a person than we had entered with, and we hope to capture that new sense in this exhibit.’’
Kerouac, a Lowell native, attended Lowell High School before going to Columbia. He is memorialized at UMass in the Jack and Stella Kerouac Center for Public Humanities, which is run by Milner.
The free, public opening event, which begins at 3 p.m., will feature remarks by Tietchen and Millner, who will detail their visit to the author’s home. For more information, visit the Kerouac website.
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