News at Eleven: [Jack] Kerouac forgot nothing.

Friends in Lowell, Massachusetts, where he grew up, called him 'Memory Babe' for his grip on the details of his past. From his teens he seems to have written down everything he ever did, thought or felt, often in multiple versions, creating, in addition to his shelf of autobiographical novels, a vast manuscript archive of notes, letters and diaries--now housed in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Six of the women in Kerouac's life--his first two wives and four occasional lovers--either wrote books about him or were the subject of books. Glassman was the first with a memoir and now, writing under her married name as Joyce Johnson, has added a second, more substantial account.

from London Review of Books: Mad to Be Saved

~~~~~~~~~~~