Lowell Celebrates Kerouac & The Young Prometheans Poetry Collection

It’s LCK! time again. If you find yourself downtown today or tomorrow for the Kerouac festival you should stop by the first floor of the library and check out our Kerouac Corner and Young Promethean Poetry Collection (look for the YPPC call number for those searching our catalog). We dedicated the corner this past March as part of the Kerouac birthday celebrations, but at that time the cataloging and processing of the Young Promethean Poetry Collection hadn’t quite been finished. We’re happy to announce that just in time for LCK 2015 we’ve finalized the collection and installed a dedicatory plaque to explain the collection’s origin and unique name.

The plaque reads:

Young Prometheans Poetry Collection

Established in 2015 with a donation of over 400 books by poet Paul Marion

A group of young intellectuals gathered in Lowell in the early 1940’s to discuss various topics, share ideas, write stories, produce radio plays, sing songs, perform skits and generally support and inspire one another’s creativity, self-expression, and intellectual curiosity. Among the members of this group were a young Jack Kerouac and his best friend Sebastian Sampas. The group called themselves the Young Prometheans for they viewed the myth of Prometheus—a titan who gave fire to humans in defiance of Zeus and paid a severe price for his defiance—as an astute allegory for the creative fearlessness they looked to foster within one another. We hope by naming this substantial poetry collection in their honor we will continually inspire future generations of young thinkers, singers, and poets, to keep their creative fires lit, no matter the cost.

Young Prometheans Poetry collection and Kerouac Corner – 1st floor, Pollard Memorial Library, 401 Merrimack St, Lowell