On The Road, Off The Market

After Jack Kerouac, acclaimed beat writer, drank himself to death, he left his worldly possessions to his mother.

According to a letter he sent to a nephew prior to his death, he had no intention of leaving so much as a scrap of paper to his third wife. And who ended up with all the manuscripts and the house and all the rest?

Mr. Kerouac's mother was not in good health when she inherited her son's property. Within three years of his death, she was gone, and she left the Jack Kerouac legacy to....his third wife.

Twenty years later, Mr. Kerouac's daughter saw a copy of the will and realized that her grandmother could not possibly have signed it. A suit was filed, to have the will thrown out, and the wheels of justice began their slow grind.

It fell to one of Mr. Kerouac's nephews to carry on the case, proving that the will was forged. Fifteen years after the document was first contested, a Florida judge has decreed that Kerouac's invalid mother could not possibly have signed the will and it is indeed a forgery.

In the time that the third wife's heirs had possession of Kerouac's items, they sold off his signature trench coat to Johnny Depp and then marketed the original manuscript of On The Road, which was recently sold to the owner of the Indianapolis Colts for over two million dollars.

Given that the third wife's family came into the legacy via fraud, does that make the manuscript stolen goods? Can the owner be forced to return it to its rightful owner, who wants all of Kerouac's papers to be sold in one piece to a university or a museum?

There is far too much money involved for this case to be settled with one judge's decision. The benefactors of the fraud have already gained handsomely from selling the manuscript, and stand to gain a great deal more by selling off the estate in pieces. One legal ruling will not settle the dispute. Expect an appeal to be filed shortly.