For some reason the recently published book pictured above, Running Though Heaven: Visions of Jack Kerouac, Selections from the Jacob Lowenthiel Collection (Grolier Club, 2026), has been hard to find. It’s not even available on Amazon if you can believe it. After learning of its contents I had to have a copy for my growing Beat library.
I found one through San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore—which somehow seems appropriate. It’s a treasure trove of Kerouac gems from unpublished letters in collector Jacob Lowenthiel’s private collection, among them,
“Whatever you do in life, be sure of one thing: Don’t forget God. He is all the beauty and love that we have ever known, or anyone else has ever known.”
—Jack Kerouac
That’s a marquee quote if there ever was one. It’s from an unpublished letter written in 1941. Kerouac, then 19, was a freshman at Columbia University writing to George Apostolos, his hometown friend in Lowell, Massachusetts.
This is the publisher’s description (and why I had to own a copy)—the book is a gold mine. Stay tuned—I’m sure to be sharing more.
This book explores the life and authorial development of Jack Kerouac through previously unpublished papers, letters, and other literary artifacts.
In Running Through Heaven: Visions of Jack Kerouac, Jacob Loewentheil tells the father of the Beat generation’s story through letters, several unpublished manuscripts, notable copies of Kerouac’s major works, literary artifacts, and personal items. These physical objects convey quirks, habits, and intimate facets of Kerouac’s character, showing the writer in the making. His early letters, many previously unpublished and from Loewentheil’s own collection, shed light on his emerging and highly influential stream of consciousness style.
Running Through Heaven testifies to the richness of Kerouac’s writing, his lifelong love of education, his complex relationship with religion, the tensions and contradictions in his sexuality, his influence on other writers, his turn toward conservatism, and his pivotal relationship with his mother. To fixate on the continuing popularity of On the Road is to miss Kerouac’s legacy, which extends far beyond literary circles. (emphasis mine).