Florida Court Finds Jack Kerouac’s WIll Was Forged

Posted by majestic on July 29, 2009

It has been nearly 40 years since Beat Generation icon Jack Kerouac died of chronic alcoholism in St. Petersburg, his popularity at low ebb and his estate worth less than $30,000.

Decades later, actor Johnny Depp paid half that price for just Kerouac’s raincoat. The scroll manuscript for Kerouac’s On the Road fetched $2.43 million.

Did Kerouac want his in-laws to get all those riches?

In one of the longest-running probate battles in Pinellas court history, a judge on Friday declared the will purportedly signed by Kerouac’s mother — the mom who inherited Kerouac’s belongings at his 1969 death — to be a forgery.

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