Bringing It All Back Home

UMass Lowell is now home to the world’s most comprehensive collection of Jack Kerouac materials, thanks to a father and son’s extraordinary generosity.

The late John Sampas, Kerouac’s brother-in-law and his literary executor, bequeathed his extensive Kerouac archive to the university in 2017. And this year his son, John Shen-Sampas, made a commitment of $20,000 to help the university fully catalog and curate what will be known as “Visions of Kerouac: The John Sampas Collection.”

“These are, quite simply, landmark gifts,” says Michael Millner, director of UML’s Kerouac Center for the Humanities and the Nancy Donahue Professor of the Arts. “We’re deeply grateful to John Shen-Sampas for helping us preserve the legacy of these two great Lowellians.”

Now housed at the UML’s Mogan Cultural Center, the John Sampas Collection fills 100 banker boxes and contains copies of everything Kerouac ever wrote—his manuscripts, both published and unpublished; his complete correspondence; magazine articles and news clippings; fan mail; and original material and memorabilia. It also includes Sampas’ business papers, which provide an invaluable record of how he nurtured Kerouac’s legacy and legend.

The bond between Kerouac and Sampas began in Lowell, where both men were born. The city shaped Kerouac’s character, fed his imagination and set him on his artistic path. In 1960, Kerouac put it this way: “Decided to become a writer at age 17 under influence of Sebastian Sampas,” his closest childhood friend and John’s older brother.

Once he began, he “wrote like a volcano,” says Millner. He documented every aspect of his life in Lowell and set five of his novels here. In 1966, he deepened his ties to the Sampas family when he wed John’s sister, Stella.

John Sampas shared this same powerful connection to Lowell, and it made him a fierce guardian of his brother-in-law’s work. For more than 25 years, he worked tirelessly to advance Kerouac’s reputation and the value of his literary estate.

He also partnered with UMass Lowell to foster Kerouac scholarship and nurture new writers and readers. He helped underwrite the Kerouac Center for the Public Humanities; the Kerouac Writer-in-Residence program; and the Kerouac Family Memorial Scholarship, which has benefited more than two dozen undergraduate English majors. He also donated a trove of Kerouac’s personal effects, which are now exhibited at Allen House.

Sampas died in 2017, and late the following year his collection came to UMass Lowell—all 110 linear feet of it. Under the guidance of university archivist Tony Sampas, Millner and a team of UMass Lowell students completed a “box-level” inventory that now spans more than 7,000 entries on the Kerouac Center’s Digital Archive—“all of it searchable,” says Millner. “This gives us what librarians call ‘intellectual control’ over the collection. We know where things are and can track them easily.”

Since his father’s death, John Shen-Sampas has assumed the role of Kerouac’s literary executor and the mission of keeping his legacy alive. His $20,000 commitment—and a generous grant from Mass Humanities—will help take the collection to the next level. Not only will Millner and his students complete an item-by-item inventory, they will also draw on the collection help mark Kerouac’s centennial in 2022.

“One of the uncanny effects of the archive of a dead author is that it allows the author to become even more alive,” Millner notes. “Visions of Kerouac: The John Sampas Collection” has that power, he says, and it will help “make Lowell the destination for those who want to be closer to Kerouac, both serious scholars and readers who are falling under his spell for the first time.”

—Beth Brosnan