“A multicultural tapestry of American voices”: How Pic Reframes On the Road

A conversation with Brett Sigurdson about Jack Kerouac’s archives.

I recently had the pleasure of reading a fantastic essay by Brett Sigurdson (editor of Beat Spotlight and a contributor to Beatdom #25). Brett has spent a huge amount of time in the Jack Kerouac archives at the N.Y.P.L. Berg Collection, Emory University, and UMass-Lowell, where he has been examining the textual history of On the Road, and his investigations have led to some incredible findings, which are recounted in “‘Jess ’Maginary Lines in People’s Heads’: How Jack Kerouac’s Archive and His Problematic Novella Rewrites the Myths of On the Road,” published in Contemporary Literature Vol. 66, No.1. I’ve asked him some questions about his research for the benefit of Beatdom’s subscribers.

For those who know more than the basic mythology of On the Road, the textual history can be quite overwhelming. The more you learn, the more you see why it took him so long to reach the published version. Your essay mentions the various characters and titles and concepts, as well as the fact that—at least at one point—he had somewhere in the region of 200,000 words of just notes for his book. As a researcher, how do you keep track of all this?

Well, I had plenty of help from Kerouac himself. He seemed to keep everything, and Kerouac took diligent care of his files—no small feat, given the number of times he moved throughout his life. I mean, just look at the length of the finding aid for the New York Public Library’s Kerouac Collection, and then imagine movers packing it up to drive from Orlando to Berkeley in spring 1957, whereby Kerouac had it all packed up again weeks later to be hauled back to Florida. Granted, his archive was much smaller then, but still—what a risk, no?

I bring this up because I’ve thought a lot about luck over the years I spent in the archives for my doctoral dissertation on Kerouac’s life and work (which, by the way, is how “Jess ’Maginary Lines” started). When I came across the random slips of paper on which he jotted down potential book titles for what we know as On the Road—many of them typed on tissue-thin paper and stuffed between notebook pages—I thought, How lucky is it that these scraps survived?

As I’m sure you know from your work on A Remarkable Collection of Angels, remarkable stories can be revealed in the archives. But it takes time and effort to follow the contours of the narratives that such documents divulge. Take the titles Kerouac recorded. From these scraps, I saw that he pondered titles like “Goodnight, Thou Road,” “The Big Sad Road,” “Praying Road Blues,” and—inexplicably—“Snot and Bubblegum.” Aside from the latter, the cumulative list of titles revealed Kerouac’s ongoing conception of the Road narrative, how he considered the spiritual, religious, and cyclical dimensions of the story he wanted to tell. Or needed to tell. His archives indicate that he was obsessed with telling a story of mid-century Americans roaming through the country. He just couldn’t find the right form—the right vehicle, so to speak. Jotting down titles was one of the ways he sought to find the right way to tell this story.

To track the routes, wrong turns, and detours of On the Road’s development, then, I had to pay attention to the stories his archive was telling me in micro and macro senses—what was he experiencing and writing about month to month, year to year, between 1947 and 1951? I had in mind the wisdom of Jim Jones, a Kerouac scholar, who argues that Kerouac will only be taken seriously as a writer if his achievements are framed by comparing the authorized texts to the draft manuscripts, journal entries, and correspondence.

Look, the problem when it comes to Kerouac is that friends, admirers, and critics have told lies and half-truths about Kerouac that have hardened into myth since On the Road’s publication. I believe that careful, considered research into the archive—the kind of research I’m trying to do—is the past, present, and future of Kerouac scholarship. Meaning: the kind of work that I’m doing in this essay is about correcting the errors and erroneous claims of the past for contemporary and future readers and scholars.

By the way, because I imagine there might be people reading this who, like me, are obsessively interested in the tools and methods researchers use, I keep track of all my documents using a program called DEVONthink. It helps me find the smallest needles in the biggest haystacks, which was critical as I researched the numerous precursors to On the Road, including Pic.

Pic is a strange piece of the Kerouac story for a number of reasons.

Yeah, it’s a weird book, isn’t it? I mean, could you imagine publishing such a novella today?

Aside from being quite widely derided as “problematic” and weak, it is often seen as his final book, even though it actually came after his death (and before a number of other posthumous works). Granted, it was the last one whose manuscript he prepared, but he didn’t write it in those final years; as your essay points out, he had written it some two decades earlier.

Yes, this point is crucial to understanding my essay. I want readers to understand Pic as a historical artifact rather than, you know, a work Kerouac sought to publish for its artistic merits.

The fact is, Kerouac needed to publish something in the spring of 1969, when an unexpected tax bill left him desperate for cash. Worse, as many readers of Beatdom know, the alcoholism that would kill Kerouac had, by this time, transformed him into a hollow shell of a man—he couldn’t write anything original or meaningful to sell. So, he turned to Pic, the most complete manuscript in his files. Of course, Sterling Lord, Kerouac’s agent, received swift rejections from the publishers to whom he sent the manuscript.

The only reason Grove Press published the novella in 1971 was that Kerouac’s death made for a good investment—he briefly became a marketable name again. But let’s be clear: Pic wouldn’t have been published otherwise. To read it as part of the Duluoz Legend—which Kerouac consciously shaped—is mistaken, I think. I think Pic should be read in the same way as his posthumous collections of journals and letters: as an artifact that provides context for his life and work. In this case, Pic situates Kerouac within two contradictory eras: the autumn of 1950, a period characterized by openness and creativity, and the spring of 1969, when he had essentially lost everything.

Your essay is fascinating because it sort of changes the view of Pic as a late Kerouac work into part of the long, complex story of how On the Road was written. You write, “Pic played a pivotal role in the prolonged journey that ultimately led to Kerouac’s breakthrough in the following spring, when he composed the seminal version of On the Road during an intense three-week period.”

I think many readers would consider On the Road at or near the pinnacle of Kerouac’s oeuvre. Pic, on the other hand, is probably near the bottom of their list. But my essay argues that Pic and On the Road were cut from the same page of the atlas, so to speak. Pic, which Kerouac wrote in three weeks during October and November 1950, represents an intriguing detour Kerouac took on his way to ultimately writing the famed scroll version in April 1951—also in three weeks, as most readers know. Although Kerouac abandoned the narrative route exemplified by Pic, the novella still pointed Kerouac to his final destination: On the Road.

Of course, we know that On the Road took Kerouac longer than 21 days to write. We know that he worked on the novel in fits and starts while writing his first novel, The Town and The City. And we know that he worked on other versions of On the Road after finishing the scroll—most notably Visions of Cody in 1952. For Kerouac obsessives, this isn’t new information. Scholars like Tim Hunt, Matt Theado, and others—as well as Kerouac’s collected letters and Windblown World journals—offered glimpses of the abandoned efforts that shaped the novel.

“Jess ’Maginary Lines,” then, started with my desire to dig into the stories Kerouac might have told before he wrote the scroll. In particular, I wanted to explore several abandoned manuscripts, piles of notes, and journals from the summer and fall of 1950. And what I found really made me think differently about On the Road, particularly the stories we tell about the novel, its themes, its genesis. Because the story these archival documents were telling me was that Kerouac wanted to write about American identity from the perspective of marginalized communities: Mexican Americans, Native Americans, homeless drifters, and more.

Kerouac outlines the framework for this project in a letter to Neal Cassady from October 6, 1950. The ideas that Kerouac shares are the culmination of weeks—if not months—of conceptualizing “On the Road” not as a single novel but as a series of novels about American outcasts. By the way, this letter gave Joyce Johnson the title of her Kerouac bio, The Voice is All—the appellation is fitting because Kerouac fills the letter with fascinating musings on idioms, patois, and provincialisms. It’s as if he’s auditioning concepts and characters for Cassady.

And what does Kerouac begin writing soon after finishing this letter to Cassady? Pic. Actually, at some point that night, he sketched an idea for a Romeo-and-Juliet-like story about lovers trapped on opposite sides of the Civil War, but he soon abandoned it. Yet, consider this important overlap: both of the stories he worked on that night explore arbitrary borders—and the inherent isolation such division breeds.

So, beyond Kerouac’s malleable sense of On the Road, all this context suggests Kerouac had more important ideas than simply writing about his memories of road tripping with Neal Cassady. A central argument in “Jess ’Maginary Lines,” then, is that Kerouac intended to use “On the Road” as a platform for exploring what it means to be an outsider in America—not as some disaffected hipster, mind you, but as someone whose ethnic and economic circumstances put him on the wrong side of the American dividing line. After all, one of the alienated communities he vowed to write about was the French-Canadian diaspora.

A lot of your essay deals with the idea of Kerouac as an ethnic minority and an outsider who struggled with identity, and this frames early attempts at On the Road as works of French-Canadian diaspora literature. You say, “Kerouac often changed characters’ names in these drafts, but the narrator always remained an ethnic outsider.” It wasn’t always French-Canadians but often mixes of a great many cultural and ethnic groups in a single character, reflecting Kerouac’s own feelings about his identity. I thought the crux of the essay was the point where you note Kerouac writing about a protagonist, Earnest Boncoeur, who seems very much inspired by Kerouac himself, saying, “Ain’t nobody never loved me like I loved myself except my mother, and she’s dead,” which as you point out is basically the first line of Pic. This is more than mere coincidence or the re-using of a thought because a little later, he wrote out part of that line in a notebook, attributed it to Boncoeur, and then crossed out that name and wrote above it, “Pic Jackson.”

I think the most important scholarship on Kerouac over the last decade has centered on his Franco-American heritage. Work by Hassan Melehy, Joyce Johnson, and Jean-Christophe Cloutier has provided crucial insights into the ways Kerouac infused his ethnic sensibility into his characters and narratives. Of course, people in Lowell knew about the significance of his heritage to his work long before scholars. The city is, after all, a fascinating melting pot of cultures, and French-Canadian immigrants once made up a sizeable portion of its population.

As you said, Kerouac’s own experience of marginalization, informed by the racism Franco-Americans experienced in New England—where the U.S. Commissioner of Labor dubbed them “a horde of industrial invaders”—made him feel neither Canadian, French, nor American. In a journal entry from the period I write about, Kerouac wrote (in French), “This is the secret thought of the Canuck in America—it’s important to the English. . . so the Canuck does it.”

In “Jess ’Maginary Lines,” I trace a continuous thread from summer to fall 1950, when he wrote Pic, a time when Kerouac was intensely focused on his French-Canadian heritage. His interest in the subject was sparked in large part by a review of The Town and The City by Yvonne Le Maître, a Lowell-based Franco-American writer, who criticized the novel for not portraying the Lowell-based setting in all its multicultural richness. In his response to Le Maître, written in July 1950, Kerouac expressed his commitment to embracing his ethnicity as he continued developing his second novel. Between August and October 1950, Kerouac experimented with several story concepts centered on Franco-American characters. He expanded on that focus in early October, which is about the time he conceived of writing “Road” as a multicultural American anthology of outsider voices. As I mentioned, Pic became his most developed iteration of the project.

The crucial connective tissue is the detail that you mention: Kerouac had crafted some character ideas and dialogue about a young Franco-American boy from Lowell who longs to speak English with the ease of his friends. As we know, Kerouac didn’t speak English until age seven or so. In one of the manuscripts I found, Kerouac narrates in the voice of Earnest Boncoeur, “Ain’t nobody never loved me like I love myself, ‘cept my mother and she’s dead.” But then Kerouac crossed out Boncoeur’s name and, above it, wrote “Pic Jackson.” Clearly, Kerouac felt some degree of alienation that he identified with the Black experience in mid-twentieth-century America. And that standpoint, to me, should complicate the way we think about Kerouac and On the Road.

We all know that Kerouac (alongside the other well-known Beat writers) had rather troubling depictions of women in his books and letters. He is often derided as being a sexist, and this is hard to argue against. Of course, all of these men were complex figures and using such language to denounce can be a bit reductive. I thought it was very interesting in your essay that you pointed out that Kerouac actually had female protagonists in some early versions of On the Road.

This essay took me about three years to adapt from my dissertation. A major factor was the careful way I approached the topics of race and gender, which, as you point out, are deeply rooted in contemporary discourse on Kerouac and the Beats. So deep that I’m sure some readers will offer the same well-worn rejoinders about Kerouac’s problematic behavior in the comments wherever this interview appears. One example I’m sure Kerouac’s detractors will cite as evidence of his retrograde gender politics—because it’s always mentioned—is that he gives the male characters in On the Road permission to go on the road, while his one-dimensional female characters stay at home (presumably in the kitchen).

However, the archive reveals that Kerouac considered, and even attempted, writing an On the Road story with female protagonists. The most complete version is an untitled story Kerouac authored in 1950 about a female protagonist named Kim, who travels from her home in rural Colorado to an apartment in New York City. Like Sal, Kim is naive about the world, though her innocence has a refreshing quality among the jaded, posturing bohemians she encounters. One other idea that he outlined in early 1950, which centered on a Sal-Paradise-like protagonist named Red Moultrie, shows Kerouac planning to have Moultrie, Dean, Marylou, and Terry—the Mexican Girl, whom Kerouac calls “Elena”—travel across America together. He didn’t write much, if anything, of this project, at least as far as I can tell, but its existence indicates that Kerouac consciously considered female vantage points as he wrestled with the story he wanted to write.

Ultimately, the version of On the Road that Kerouac published gave his female characters a smaller narrative role, but that doesn’t mean he harbored misogynistic tendencies. I mean, his notes and drafts show that he would have easily passed the Bechdel Test. Do these documents—and the meta-narrative they tell—provide enough of a rejoinder to combat the negative portrayals of Kerouac that have taken hold in the last few decades? Perhaps to a point. To be clear, some of the criticism of his critical consciousness is warranted. But much of it is reductive—the low-hanging fruit clutched by lazy readers and critics. I hope my essay helps challenge these assumptions about Kerouac. His archive reveals a much more complex writer and thinker on gender and race. Imperfect, to be sure, but not the racist lothario his haters would have you believe.

Much criticism of Pic stemmed not only from Kerouac writing from the perspective of a Black character when he was a White man but also from what people perceived as the inaccurate depiction of Black vernacular in the novel. I’ve never felt for a moment that Kerouac was consciously attempting to insult anyone or be condescending when replicating the speech of Black people.

I agree. I think there’s a palpable empathy in Kerouac’s portrayal of his characters. If anything, Kerouac treats his narrators—Jack Duluoz, Sal Paradise, Ray Smith, Jack Kerouac—with a harshness he rarely directs at his characters. I mean, look at the opening pages of The Dharma Bums or The Subterraneans. Kerouac shows that his narrators, Ray Smith and Leo Percepied, are reflecting on experiences—good, bad, ugly—that occurred earlier in their lives, as if they’re confessing their sins for absolution. And, even when he did insult people—as he did from time to time in his journals—Kerouac admonished himself for his lack of self-restraint, as if seeking the mercy a priest would provide.

In his books, he always strove to capture the way different people talked, and this was based upon listening very carefully, but it’s a natural, which is going to be something people will always find fault with. You see people make the same criticisms of Faulkner, for example, in The Sound and the Fury, with this idea that Black characters speaking a certain way is a means of mocking them. I live in Asia and know from personal experience that it’s an almost impossible situation for a writer. Either you accurately depict the way people speak and risk being seen as racist, or you rewrite their speech in a more standardised way to avoid that, but here you are being inauthentic and at the same time perhaps even condescending. You cited Mark Twain here and that idea of “respectfully” replicating dialogue for authenticity and tie it to what you say is Kerouac’s “original vision of On the Road as a multicultural tapestry of American voices informed by his own sense of marginalization.”

Twain is the classic example of a White writer using Black dialect, as he (in)famously did in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But I connected Pic to a lesser-known Twain story, “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” in which the narrator, a Black woman named Aunt Rachel, speaks with a dialect similar to Pic Jackson: “Oh no, Misto C—, I hain’t had no trouble. An’ no joy!”

“A True Story” is based on the experience of Mary Ann Cord, the Twain family’s Black housemaid, who watched her husband and seven children auctioned into slavery one after another. Her youngest son, Henry—who was eight at the time—was ripped from her hands. Miraculously, Cord was reunited with Henry years later during the Civil War, when his Union company arrived at the plantation where she had been enslaved. Twain lays bare the wrenching, brutal inhumanity of slavery through Aunt Rachel’s dialect, which, according to drafts of the manuscript, he worked diligently to replicate on the page.

Alyssa Alexander, a Black academic, wrote an excellent article for The Mark Twain Annual about how “A True Story” initially struck her as an example of Twain’s cavalier treatment of race. Yet, after spending more time with the story—including performing as Aunt Rachel in a school play—she grew to feel that Twain’s use of dialect helped her understand the intimacy of Twain’s narrative choice. Alexander’s words are worth repeating here: “[Twain] was willing to listen to voices that others ignored and eager to share stories; this, for me, is the power of his fiction. Not only did Twain experience enlightenment, he worked to enlighten others. Imagine the state of our world if everyone knew the value of a good story.”

Whether or not you believe Pic is a good story, I argue in my essay that Kerouac’s choice to use Black vernacular speech—and his desire to explore other American dialects in this period before On the Road as we know it—aligns with what Alexander writes of Twain: Kerouac absorbed the voices he heard in bus stops, taverns, and rail cars. Many of them were from the tongues of marginalized voices that he identified with because of his experience as the son of French-Canadian immigrants.

I didn’t write about it in the essay, but I discovered a draft of the jacket copy Kerouac wrote for Pic. Grove didn’t use the piece, but—thankfully—the publisher kept it. Kerouac writes about how “the author”—it was written in the third person, as if Kerouac were channeling a public relations hack—studied Southern Black speech patterns while living among tenant farmers in North Carolina. On the surface, Kerouac’s claim appears outrageous. And yet, he clearly felt as if he could bear witness to the experience of being Black in the South—he identified with some crucial experience of being American and feeling marginalized.

Something I did write about in “Jess ’Maginary Lines,” though, is how Julius Lester, a writer and Civil Rights activist, was commissioned by Grove to write an introduction for Pic. While he couldn’t meet the publisher’s deadline, Lester submitted a reader’s report on the novella. He indicated that Kerouac lacked a true understanding of what it meant to be Black in the world. Still, Lester praised Kerouac’s sensitivity regarding race and recommended that Grove publish the book.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s easy to assume that Kerouac is performing blackface in Pic, meaning he’s just appropriating Black culture and trivializing it. But reading Pic outside the confines of his “King of the Beats” mythos—and instead as a reflection of his own search for belonging in America—gives his work greater depth and insight.

I mentioned the criticisms levelled at Pic, and one was that he failed to understand the struggles Black people faced, and this is something many people have pointed out in regards On the Road. Here, you refer to one infamous part of the novel you call Kerouac’s “Denver Statement,” in which his narrator says he wishes he were Black rather than White. This has been something people have criticised since not long after the book was published but your essay—without trying to excuse it exactly—sort of reframes it in an important way and you relate this to his deliberate writing of Sal Paradise as naïve.

There’s a game Kerouac’s readers like to play: figure out the real person upon whom he based his characters. Neal Cassady is Dean Moriarty, Gregory Corso is Raphael Urso, Allen Ginsberg is Irwin Garden. Naturally, readers are quick to assume Jack Kerouac is always Sal Paradise, Ray Smith, or Jack Duluoz. But, according to documents in his archive, this assumption is flawed.

I cite examples in my essay that show Kerouac deliberately revising On the Road to position Sal as naive and unworldly. Take, for instance, the “Mexican Girl” episode, in which Sal picks cotton with Mexican braceros during his fling with Terry. This section often gets held up as evidence of Kerouac’s ignorant romanticization of marginalized people, as if he’s a privileged hipster with a poverty fetish.

But, building on the work of Tim Hunt, Matt Theado, and Steven Belletto, I show how Kerouac, through successive drafts, diminished Sal’s self-awareness of the meaning of his relationship with Terry and his work in the cotton fields. As I argue, Kerouac knows what he’s doing—he’s smarter than Sal.

My analysis of the Denver Statement—the shorthand scholar Amor Kohli uses in an article critical of Kerouac’s treatment of race in Road—similarly shows Kerouac embellishing Sal’s naiveté when he writes of yearning to be any race “but a white man disillusioned by the best in his own ‘white’ world.’’ While this passage has been derided by the likes of James Baldwin and Kenneth Rexroth as evidence of Kerouac’s lamentable racial politics, I argue that Kerouac deliberately positions Sal as lacking awareness of race in this part of the book—it’s a subject Sal learns more about along the road.

Kerouac adapted the Denver Statement from his journals, which gives the impression that he is merely transcribing his experience. But his more expansive journal entry shows Kerouac wrestling with identity and belonging more profoundly than his portrait of Sal suggests. And that gets to my larger point: if we assume that Kerouac is just writing thinly veiled memoir, then, of course, one could attack Kerouac’s problematic racial (and gendered) portraits. If we understand Kerouac as a novelist working within the genre of Entwicklungsroman—which is a big literary term for a novel about character development—then we can see Kerouac giving Sal a naive worldview that he will outgrow as he travels.

And this brings me back to a point I made earlier: I believe that Kerouac knows when his characters are acting problematically. That doesn’t mean he condones the behavior. Kerouac is telling a story, you know? And he’s using the tools of fiction to engage readers while exploring his own feelings about memory, morality, and belonging.

To continue with the subject of race, one of the big surprises coming from your research is the fact that the character of Dean Moriarty was partially based on a Black man called Cleophus. Of course, we all think of Moriarty just being Neal Cassady, but as you point out, it is not wise to look at Kerouac’s books and see the narrator as an exact representation of Kerouac and the other characters as perfectly accurate depictions of those people. It was fiction, after all, and thus characters were based heavily on real people but naturally changed in certain ways. In this case, we see Moriarty may have been an amalgam of Black and White men.

If this interview had a soundtrack, this is the moment where the record needle abruptly scratches and everything goes silent. Because, yeah: I argue that Kerouac’s inspiration for the famous Dean Moriarty character is not solely Neal Cassady. Kerouac also drew upon an encounter he had with a Black man from Poughkeepsie, New York, named Cleophus.

Without rehashing the evidence I cover in my essay, I base my analysis on the timing of their encounter and two “Road”-like experiments—one before Kerouac met Cleo and one after. What I noticed was Kerouac’s strained efforts to find the right dynamic between his two protagonists. Bear in mind, Kerouac generally viewed his “Road” narrative as based on the travels of a Virgil-like guide and an inexperienced, Dante-esque acolyte. Sometimes they were paired as an uncle and a nephew, or as older and younger cousins. But it seems that Kerouac’s lack of certainty about his protagonists’ identities paralleled his uncertainty about the register of his narrative voice. Sometimes, he’d write in the hip patois of a Times Square hustler; other times, he’d mimic that grand Wolfian cadence he loved in his teens—sometimes, both in the same draft.

But then I noticed something shifted in Kerouac’s writing after he spent the night talking with Cleo in February 1950. Kerouac’s characterization of Dean became much more assured in his next “Road” attempt, “Flower That Blows in the Night,” which he wrote only a few weeks after his Poughkeepsie trip (the story was later retitled “Go, Go, Go”). In so many ways, the Dean we see in that story is the Dean we know from the On the Road scroll, and he’s distinguishable over a year before Kerouac rolled the first inches of his paper roll into the typewriter.

Here’s what’s even more fascinating: as I learned more about Kerouac’s experience with Cleo, I noticed some familiar details. Cleo talked a mile a minute, he possessed unlimited energy and charisma, and he sped through the city to make dalliances with multiple girlfriends. Sound familiar? What’s more, some of the conversations Kerouac recorded from his time with Cleo appear verbatim in Dean’s dialogue from “Flower.” I cite other fascinating overlaps between Dean, Cassady, and Cleo to make my case, too.

What this story does is call into question the prevailing narratives about On the Road’s genesis, especially that Kerouac was inspired to write the scroll version after receiving the famous Joan Anderson letter from Cassady in December 1950. As I illustrate in my article, Kerouac had wrapped his mind around Dean Moriarty’s characterization as early as March 1950.

I can imagine Kerouacians shaking their heads in disbelief. And I get why: Kerouac never talked about Cleo when he discussed On the Road. But look: tracing the line between inspiration and its ends is a Gordian knot, especially at a time when Kerouac was experimenting with so many different approaches to On the Road. I also think it’s legitimate to point out that seven years between writing “Flower” and publishing On the Road—that much time has a way of flattening the finer details of such matters. With all that said, even if the ratio of Dean’s DNA is eighty percent Cassady and twenty percent a Black man named Cleo, that’s relevant enough to revise some of On the Road’s legends.

Let’s end this with what wasn’t the end of Pic—the missing final chapter. Why did Kerouac cut this, and how does that affect how people have understood his book and its place in his oeuvre?

As most biographies posit, Kerouac drafted a final chapter for Pic before sending it to Sterling Lord in 1969. However, his wife Stella and his mother convinced him to toss it. Kerouac intended for Dean and Sal to pick up Slim and Pic along the highway, but it felt like a weird television crossover, like Homer Simpson appearing on Family Guy. The chapter has never been published and, as far as anyone knew, it disappeared with the trash long ago.

But a few years ago, I found a typescript of the chapter in Sterling Lord’s papers. I gasped. The chapter is real.

I hope readers will check out my essay to learn more about what Kerouac wrote, but I will say this much: Kerouac should have listened to his instincts—his narrative is compelling and energetic and messy in the way that makes Kerouac frustrating and endearing. The unpublished chapter does a tidier job of closing Pic’s narrative—it feels less abrupt than the novella as we know it, more hopeful.

Is this missing final chapter enough to revise our thinking about Pic and Kerouac? It’s probably not enough to make Pic a more popular book in Kerouac’s canon, but I hope the contextual details I provide about this novella and other stories help lead to a re-assessment of Kerouac’s artistry by complicating the stories that fans, scholars, and critics so often tell about him. It’s easy to assume that the Kerouac mythos is as unbreakable as adamantium, that there’s nothing new to learn. But, believe me—as this essay and some of the other projects I’m working on demonstrate—we still have much to discover about the man and his work.

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“‘Jess ’Maginary Lines in People’s Heads’: How Jack Kerouac’s Archive and His Problematic Novella Rewrite the Myths of On the Road” can be purchased from Contemporary Literature or accessed for free through databases like Project MUSE (available through many university or other institutional subscriptions).

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Dr. Brett Sigurdson has published contributions to Rethinking Kerouac: Afterlives, Continuities, Reappraisals (Bloomsbury, 2025) and The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac (Cambridge UP, 2024). He is currently revising his dissertation on Jack Kerouac for publication as a monograph.

Further Reading

People interested in the above discussion may also want to read a 2016 essay by Brian Hassett in which he argues that “Pic is better than conventional wisdom has it.”