JAN KEROUAC AND GERALD NICOSIA VINDICATED

As anyone who has read this blog for a while probably knows, I have always been a staunch defender of poet Gerry Nicosia's charge, on behalf of Jan Kerouac, that Jack's mother's will was forged and that Jack's intention was to keep his archives intact and away from his last wife's family, and that his nephew Paul Blake should benefit from whatever estate there was as well.

This battle has been going on for decades, but a court has finally ruled, that indeed the will was forged and that Jan (unfortunately long since deceased) and Paul Blake should have a claim on the estate.

The most unfortunate thing about all this is how many of the old Beats and their younger supporters and wannabes defended the Sampas family's grab of the estate, even when they initially were selling it off piecemeal against Jack's known, stated, and written, wishes. The reason being that Viking/Penquin had a huge stake in developing the Jack Kerouac brand and academics who wanted access to the archives or poets and authors who wanted their books published by Viking/Penquin and not to be ostracized from the inner Beat circles, needed to "go along to get along" as they say in politics.

I always believed the reason a book of mine that was accepted by Penquin was eventually not published when Viking, the mother company reversed the decision, had something to do with my defending Gerry and Jan's fight against the Sampas family.

I've written about it enough elsewhere, most recently in a post about the publication of a book about Jan here, so I won't go into any more details about the case. But check out these links here and here, and thanks to Ron Silliman's blog for them.