Today in history: Jack Kerouac and the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress

On this date in 1800 the Library of Congress was established by an act of Congress signed into law by President John Adams. The initial appropriation was $5,000 for books.

Let me now answer the obvious question: What does that have to do with Jack Kerouac?

Two things come to mind. One is that Jack -- ever the autodidact -- spent a great deal of time reading in the public library in his hometown of Lowell, MA, often skipping classes at Lowell High School to do so:

Once a week he cut classes to study on his own in the Lowell Public Library, reading Goethe and Hugo, showing off to himself that he could absorb things like William Penn's Maxims, methodically examining the Harvard Classics, and getting truly excited over H.G. Wells' Outline of History and the classic Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. (from Gerald Nicosia's Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac, University of California Press, 1994, p. 50)

The other point is that there are Kerouac resources at the Library of Congress. Just visit https://www.loc.gov/ and search for Jack Kerouac. My search revealed 480 items with 79 of them available on-line.

Jack Kerouac and libraries. They go together like a horse and carriage....