Eyewitness

New Mexico's supreme court is

considering whether the author of

a critical biography of Jack Kerouac

can continue to act as literary executor to the Beat writer's daughter, Jan Kerouac.

The case is the latest twist in a legal wrangle between Gerald Nicosia - author of the writer's biography, Memory Babe - and the executors of Kerouac's first wife's estate to unlock access to the wealth of manuscripts, letters and other material left when the writer died in 1969.

While academics have been at

best ambiguous about the literary merits of writers such as Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, collectors have been capitalising on the soaring value of Beat memorabilia.

The Kerouac archive, including the original Teletype scroll manuscript of On the Road and paintings, journals, letters and unpublished novels and

stories, has been estimated to be worth $10 million-$20 million.

Oliver Harris, lecturer in American literature at Keele University and editor of The Letters of William Burroughs 1945-1959, says: "Archiving has probably come a little late for people like Kerouac, because there has not been a well-trodden academic interest owing to the ambivalent regard in which he is held in some quarters.

"The academic interest is rising, although not as fast as the appetite for pop cult treatment - and the latter is, in some respects, still checking and holding back an academic interest outside the rather narrow field of what can now be called Beat studies."

In the 1980s and early 1990s Dr Harris was surprised by how poorly US university archives on Kerouac, Ginsberg and others were catalogued and preserved, but he accepts that the belatedly recognised financial value of the archives may now mean more attention is being paid to cataloguing and preservation.

"The value of most archive material is largely in popular biography, which has shaded out the old-style scholarly approach of examining manuscripts and similar documents," he says. "Because of the pressure to publish, the scholarly interest in manuscripts is slowly dying." Once an archive is opened and material published by biographers or researchers, its financial value falls.

Mr Nicosia is involved in a separate dispute with the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, Kerouac's home town. In 1987 he sold taped interviews with 300 people who knew Kerouac - including Ginsberg, Burroughs and John Clelland Holmes, taped when he researched Memory Babe in the late 1970s - to the university, stipulating they should be accessible to scholars.

"Half of them are dead now. This material is of inestimable value. For scholars it is irreplaceable," he says.

Yet he claims that the library is restricting access to much of the material, which is deteriorating, a claim disputed by Lowell librarian Martha Mayo.