Joyce Johnson on Her Relationship with Jack Kerouac and His Enduring Legacy

A glass ashtray—the kind you used to find often in American households—was recently on exhibit in the second-floor gallery of the Grolier Club.

But the ashes were fifty-six years old; they must have dropped from a cigarette Jack Kerouac was smoking the day he died, unexpectedly, in St. Petersburg, Florida, at the age of forty-seven.

Born poor, he died broke, with his books out of fashion, although he was still a hou