One of the many surprises tucked away in the vast Jack Kerouac Archive at the New York Public Library is the tiny pocket notebook in which Kerouac reacted in the fall of 1947 to a conversation he'd just had with his mother. She had been horrified by a story in her morning paper about bands of abandoned children living in caves in a remote part of Italy, who were ravaging the countryside in their search for food and having sex and babies as early as 13. Jack's mother wanted the Pope to step right in and put a stop to this. Her son wrote in his notebook: "I want to go there."
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