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1940 he and others formed a dramatic group, the Variety Players, and produced a radio play. Friends like Bill Chandler, Bill Ryan, and John (“Ian”) MacDonald wrote, drew cartoons, and listened to Beethoven. In Lonesome Traveler, Kerouac writes, “Decided to become a writer at age 17 under influence of Sebastian Sampas, local young poet who later died on Anzio beach head.” Sebastian’s older brother Charles, a journalist with the Lowell Sun, stoked the ambitions of Jack, Sebastian, and others. The elder Sampas was also mindful of Lowell’s literary heritage. Nineteenth-century Lowell, the model textile mill city, had a cultural buzz for a long moment. Charles Dickens wrote about Lowell in his American Notes for General Circulation, Emerson delivered twenty-five lectures in the city, and Thoreau chronicled the region in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Kerouac’s own Franco-Americans had distinguished themselves as journalists, publishers, and music composers.
    Kerouac was friendly with Michael Largay and other writers associated with Alentour : A National Magazine of Poetry, a modern poetry journal published in Lowell from 1935 to 1943. In the unsigned 1940 essay “New England Thought” from Alentour, a writer describes the Concord River sliding past nineteenth-century houses of poets and philosophers in Concord, carrying “a twig Emerson may have once broken from a branch” toward the Merrimack River in Lowell. But the once-humming mills are closed when the twig at last drifts into sight: “[...] perhaps a boy playing barefooted by the edge of the river picked up the twig, long from Emerson’s hand, and planted it that later it would grow into a tree, bringing life to the ruins. And then because workers were idle and had time to listen, perhaps the birds would come to the tree to sing.” Kerouac heard the song in the trees. He read Emerson’s essay “The Poet” and Thoreau’s Walden and later imagined living in a hut like Thoreau, high atop Christian Hill overlooking Lowell. Analyzing himself in 1941, Kerouac explained why he was a poet: “He is a man, so he does the most man-like thing and writes for his fellow men.”
    Kerouac recoiled from what he viewed as spirit-killing millwork in his hometown, but he did not flee Lowell in 1939; he built on what he had accomplished there and stepped forward to pursue artistic and material success. Though he was awarded a “scholastic scholarship” to attend Columbia University, Kerouac was required to spend a year preparing for the rigors of the Ivy League. Accordingly he attended the Horace Mann School, a private school in New York City. While there in November 1939 Kerouac wrote to fellow Lowell High School football hero Ray Riddick, who had been graduated ahead of him and starred at Fordham University. Kerouac asked about free rides with Lowell truckers making the run from New York: “As I’m going to Columbia next year, and then for four more years, it would be convenient for me to start knowing my Lowell brethren truck drivers.” He planned to keep town and city linked.
    At Horace Mann, Kerouac combined his interests in sports and writing and then moved to Columbia, where the American romance of Thomas Wolfe defeated football dreams. He had sought New York as the nation’s cultural nucleus. Athletic recruiters from Boston College and Duke University could not compete with Manhattan’s theater, jazz, and publishers. He mixed with the sharp upper-class students at Horace Mann, joined the drama club, and dug the city’s music scene. With his friend Seymour Wyse, he heard jazz greats at the Savoy Ballroom and Apollo Theatre. In prep school and college he composed themes on Dante, Virgil, Milton, and other giants. At Columbia he shared his writings with Eugene Sheffer, professor of French, and studied Shakespeare with Professor Mark Van Doren.
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