On the Road
On the Road is a novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, written in April 1951, and published by Viking Press in 1957. It is a largely autobiographical work that was based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America.It is often considered a defining work of the postwar Beat Generation that was inspired by jazz, poetry, and drug experiences. While many of the names and details of Kerouac’s experiences are changed for the novel, hundreds of references in On the Road have real-world counterparts.
Kerouac typed the manuscript on what he called “the scroll”:[3] a continuous, one hundred and twenty-foot scroll of tracing paper sheets that he cut to size and taped together. The roll was typed single-spaced, without margins or paragraph breaks.”The scroll” still exists — it was bought in 2001, by Jim Irsay (Indianapolis Colts football team owner), for $2.4 million, and is available for public viewing. The scroll was displayed in sections at Indiana University’s Lilly Library in mid-2003, and in January 2004, the roll started a thirteen-stop, four-year national tour of museums and libraries, starting at the Orange County History Center in Orlando, Florida. From January through March 2006, it was at the San Francisco Public Library with the first 30 feet (9 m) unrolled. It spent three months at the New York Public Library in 2007, and in the spring of 2008 visited the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The scroll traveled next to Columbia College Chicago in the autumn of 2008, then was displayed at the Birmingham University in England, before being moved once more to University College, Dublin,Ireland and then to NUI Maynooth before returning to the US in March 2009.
The legend of how Kerouac wrote On The Road excludes the tedious organization and preparation preceding the creative explosion. Kerouac carried small notebooks, in which much of the text was written as the eventful seven-year span of road trips unfurled.Besides the differences in formatting, the original scroll manuscript contained real names and was longer than the published novel. Kerouac deleted sections (including some sexual depictions deemed pornographic in 1957) and added smaller literary passages.
On The Road, the most famous of Jack Kerouac’s works, is not only the soul of the Beat movement and literature, but one of the most important novels of the century. His loosely structured, autobiographical works reflect a peripatetic life, with warm but stormy relationships and a deep social disillusionment assuaged by drugs, alcohol, mysticism, and biting humor.
