Jack Kerouac’s “Dharma Bums” Manuscript Moves to Florida

Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 12.01.05 | 1:29 PM ET

Jack Kerouac is most famous for his novel “On the Road,” but I’ve always been partial to “The Dharma Bums,” with its train-hoping, Zen-musing, haiku-writing, Sierra-tramping protagonists. I’d put it on my Top 10 Desert Island Novels List any day. So I was happy to see a recent story in the Orlando Sentinel noting that the Kerouac Project of Orlando just acquired the final 197-page draft manuscript of the novel for preservation. Kerouac apparently found inspiration for the book’s ending while star-gazing in Florida.

Interestingly, Kerouac, too, thought “Bums” would be his best novel yet, writing in a letter than he was working on a book “greater than On the Road.”

The Sentinel’s story features this terrific passage about project co-founder Bob Kealing:

An ebullient Kealing had just returned from a trip to Lowell, Mass., where he had wrapped up details of the purchase and had “the best time,” he said, sitting around a kitchen table, listening to Kerouac’s brother-in-law, John Sampas, and other family members swap stories.

When he carried the manuscript back to Orlando on a plane, he balanced it so carefully that a fellow passenger asked him if he had a cheesecake in that box he cradled.

I love that. Apparently Kealing paid $60,000 for the manuscript. That would be one pricey cheesecake.