On the Road: The Original Scroll by Jack Kerouac, Joshua Kupetz (Introduction), George Mouratidis (Introduction), Penny Vlagopoulos (Introduction), Howard Cunnell

From the Publisher

The legendary 1951 scroll draft of On the Road, published as Kerouac originally composed it

IN THREE WEEKS in April of 1951, Jack Kerouac wrote his first full draft of On the Road—typed as a single-spaced paragraph on eight long sheets of tracing paper, which he later taped together to form a 120-foot scroll. A major literary event when it was published in Viking hardcover in 2007, this is the uncut version of an American classic—rougher, wilder, and more provocative than the official work that appeared, heavily edited, in 1957. This version, capturing a moment in creative history, represents the first full expression of Kerouac's revolutionary aesthetic.

The New York Times - Luc Sante

The biggest immediate difference between the first draft and the finished product…is that while we know On the Road as a novel—the great novel of the Beat Generation—the scroll is essentially nonfiction, a memoir that uses real names and is far less self-consciously literary. It is a dazzling piece of writing for all of its rough edges, and, stripped of affectations that in the novel can sometimes verge on bathos, as well as of gratuitous punctuation supplied by editors more devoted to rules than to music, it seems much more immediate and even contemporary&#The scroll clarifies the book's connection to the past—to Mark Twain and tramp narratives and Woody Guthrie and cowboy sagas—and underlines the features it shares with its nearest contemporaneous cultural relative, Robert Frank's great photographic road book The Americans. The novel that On the Road became was inarguably the book that young people needed in 1957, but the sparse and unassuming scroll is the living version for our time.

New York Times Book Review - Luc Sante

A dazzling piece of writing for all of its rough edges, stripped of affectations that in the novel can sometimes verge on bathos . . . It seems much more immediate and contemporary.

Michael Rogers - Library Journal

Though On The Roadwouldn't be published until 1957, Keroauc wrote the book's initial draft in 1951 on a 120'-long sheet of paper without any paragraph breaks-a rolling boil of text. The early draft also uses the real names of those upon whom the characters are based (Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, etc.). The story went through several additional drafts, picking up fictitious names (Kerouac became Sal Paradise; Cassady, Dean Moriarty) and toning down the style a bit. The scroll looms large in the Kerouac legend, and this is the first time the original draft has been published as is (still no paragraph breaks). Solid fodder for scholars and a real treat for fans. A big thumbs up (get it?).

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