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Lot Essay
“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“I’ve telled all the road now. Went fast because road is fast ... wrote whole thing on strip of paper 120 foot long ... just rolled it through typewriter and in fact no paragraphs ... rolled it out on floor and it looks like a road...”
—Jack Kerouac to Neal Cassady, 22 May 1951
The Original Scroll: a 20th-century Masterpiece
In April 1951, in a loft on West 21st Street, Jack Kerouac threaded a continuous roll of taped tracing paper into his typewriter and over twenty days produced the legendary On the Road scroll—an unbroken torrent of language running nearly 120 feet that captured, with unprecedented immediacy, the velocity of postwar American life and its so-called Beat Generation. Fueled by caffeine and armed with the stories from his cross-country road trips, it was an effort to tell everything, all at once. The format was integral to the method: the scroll eliminated pauses and enabled a compositional flow that followed thought and sensation in real time. The result was not a conventional working draft but—after years of false starts—the decisive moment when Kerouac’s voice, subject, and technique fused into a form that altered American prose. In the words of Howard Cunnell, the On the Road scroll is “among the most significant, celebrated, and provocative artifacts in contemporary American literary history.”
On the Road remains the most popular of Kerouac’s works, with its portrayal of a semi-nomadic subculture strikingly at variance with the conformist and materialistic American culture of the 1950s. To those who chose to reject the simplistic formulations of commercialized mass culture and embrace what they saw as a new, unflinching truthfulness, the Beat movement held the promise of heightened sensation, enhanced perception and a transforming sense of the potential of the individual. John Clellon Holmes, a member of Kerouac’s circle and author of the early Beat novel Go, described the sense of excitement in the air in the early 1950s: “Everyone I knew felt it in one way or another—that bottled eagerness for talk, for joy, for excitement, for sensation, for new truths. Whatever the reason, everyone of my age had a look of impatience and expectation in his eyes that bespoke ungiven love, unreleased ecstasy and the presence of buried worlds within.” The novel is a time capsule of not only the headiness but also the prejudices of its time; despite this, it continues to speak to generations of readers. New Yorker writer Amanda Petrusich has explored this complexity and acknowledges: "Yet the way that novel is so enduring—so impervious to shifting cultural winds—seems to indicate something about how successfully it articulates a very American rootlessness..."
In that 20-day stint at the typewriter that has become part of literary lore, Kerouac created a work so unique in its form and radical in its narrative that it was summarily rejected by a string of generally innovative editors and publishers. But Kerouac continued to write, voluminously. In the six years between the creation of the On the Road scroll and the book’s 1957 publication, he completed at least eleven books and a large quantity of poetry and prose, refining the technique he later termed “spontaneous writing” or “sketching,” which has been equated to the sinuous lines of modern jazz (which Kerouac loved) and to the drip technique of the painter Jackson Pollock, Kerouac’s contemporary. As one critic has noted, Kerouac’s “spontaneous bop prosody” (as Ginsberg termed it) “created an action painting of the word.”
The On the Road scroll composed in 1951 and the novel as it was eventually published in 1957 differ in form, tone, and structure. The scroll is a single, unbroken paragraph—raw, fast, unedited, uncensored, notably using the real names of Kerouac’s friends. The first edition—shaped by legal concerns, editorial guidance, and the constraints of conventional book production—was divided into chapters, heavily punctuated, and softened in places. Pseudonyms replaced real names; episodes were reordered, condensed, or combined; and some of the linguistic wildness was toned down. What emerged in print was a more coherent, marketable novel, but one that inevitably muted the raw velocity and unfiltered truthfulness that make the scroll a 20th-century masterpiece.
“Aimer, travailler, souffir”
Jack Kerouac, born Jean-Louis Kerouac in 1922 to French-Canadian parents in Lowell, Massachusetts, grew up in a tightly knit immigrant family shaped by the motto “aimer, travailler, souffrir” (“love, work, suffer”). A gifted athlete and early writer—even though English was his second language—he decided in adolescence to become both a novelist and an adventurer, inspired by Jack London. After attending Horace Mann on a football scholarship, he entered Columbia University in 1940, where exposure to jazz and the novels of Thomas Wolfe helped form his literary sensibility.
Disillusioned with school, Kerouac left Columbia and served in the Merchant Marine and briefly in the Navy during World War II; at sea, reading Galsworthy’s 1922 The Forsyte Saga planted the idea for the autobiographical series he later called The Duluoz Legend. In 1944, back in New York, through his friend Lucien Carr, he met Allen Ginsberg, at the time a young poet, and William S. Burroughs, who had not yet become a writer. Their meeting marked the coalescence of the three most important literary figures of the still embryonic Beat movement, and the powerful creative connections between them and others in their circle, including the novelist John Clellon Holmes, were key factors in the artistic and philosophical directions in which the movement would evolve. After the death of his father in 1946, Kerouac began work on his first novel, The Town and the City, published in 1950. As recounted in the opening of On the Road, Jack’s friends Hal Chase and Ed White showed Jack a letter they had received from Neal Cassady, “a young jailkid shrouded in mystery,” written from a reform school in New Mexico. Finally, in December 1946 “news came that Dean [Neal] was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first time.” Although he left New York again in March, Cassady’s effect upon Kerouac was powerful; they bonded over shared ambition, restlessness, and a fascination with the American landscape and its possibilities. Their early correspondence shows an intense, reciprocal fascination, and on July 17th, Kerouac left New York for his first trip on the road.
Stops and Starts
Beginning in 1948, Kerouac struggled through multiple abandoned drafts of the novel that eventually became On the Road. His earliest conception, outlined in a 1948 letter, was an "American-scene picaresque” about two hitchhiking boys crossing the country, working odd jobs, and returning home disillusioned. These early fragments ranged from autobiographical, Wolfe-like attempts to raffish narratives with entirely different protagonists, and none captured the voice he sought. He experimented with titles and structures and envisioned the book as part of a much larger autobiographical cycle. But by late 1950 he was deeply discouraged, telling Neal Cassady that he could not yet summon the authentic, transformed voice he felt his road experiences demanded—a crisis that persisted until the breakthrough of the 1951 scroll.
Neal Cassady and William Burroughs
Kerouac saw in Neal Cassady the ideal modern outlaw-hero—charismatic, reckless, intellectually electric—who would become Dean Moriarty, one of the most enduring characters in American fiction. Their crisscrossing journeys between 1947 and 1950—New York to Denver, California, New Orleans, San Francisco, and finally deep into Mexico—would form the narrative spine of On the Road. These trips were marked by exhilaration, abandonment, and revelation: Cassady’s unpredictable departures left Kerouac alternately inspired and wounded, while Kerouac’s own return from Mexico, weakened and introspective, included the pivotal encounter with a mysterious old man who urged him to “go moan for man.” By the time he returned to New York in the autumn of 1950, Kerouac was shuttling between his mother’s home in Ozone Park and the ferment of Manhattan’s Beat circle, spending days writing and restless nights seeking companionship and creative energy that would soon carry him into the writing of the On the Road scroll.
Cassady played a decisive role in helping Kerouac discover his mature voice. Everyone who knew Cassady remarked on his uncanny gift for talk: long, free-flowing, wildly associative monologues that blended storytelling, philosophy, social commentary, and sensory detail. His wife, Carolyn, described his obsession with stretching sentences to their limit, while others recalled being overwhelmed by the sheer vitality of his speech.
Encouraged by Kerouac and Ginsberg, Cassady began typing autobiographical pieces and long letters, but it was his extraordinary 40-page “Joan Anderson letter” of December 1950—written during a three-day Benzedrine high—that electrified Kerouac (see Lot 122 in the following sale for Kerouac's discussion of this in a letter to Ed White). Its raw honesty, speed, and uninhibited narrative style revealed to Kerouac the kind of spontaneous, truthful writing he had been striving for. He considered it one of the greatest pieces of American prose he had ever read and now recognized Cassady—not Wolfe—as his true stylistic model.
The letter became the catalyst for Kerouac’s breakthrough: it sparked the freer, faster style of On the Road and the “spontaneous prose” method he would use for years. Kerouac immediately began writing long, experimental letters back to Cassady, practicing this new voice; within days he declared that they were inaugurating “a little American Renaissance” and that he had abandoned conventional fiction in favor of pure truth-telling (Kerouac to Cassady, 28 December 1950).
At about the same time, the typescript of William Burroughs’s first novel, Junkie, was being circulated among his New York circle. Kerouac read it in the West 21st Street loft and it, too, made a strong impression on him. William S. Burroughs’s Junkie offered a counterbalance—its flat, factual tone tempered Cassady’s exuberance, steering Kerouac toward a more direct, first-person narrative approach. Together, Cassady’s manic freedom and Burroughs’s stripped-down clarity would shape his style.
Composition
During a visit to Manhattan on November 3, 1950, Jack Kerouac had attended a party at Lucien Carr’s loft on West 21st Street, where he met Joan Haverty, a young dress designer who had lived next door with the late William Cannastra. Their meeting—retold in On the Road—was immediate and intense, and within two weeks they impulsively married. The day after their wedding, Kerouac moved his roll-top desk and typewriter into Joan’s spacious loft, arranging a simple work area beside their bed. It was in this large, open studio—its improvised living and working zones divided by low cabinets—that Kerouac settled into the environment where the scroll would take shape. And although they would separate within seven short months, the scroll of Kerouac’s On the Road was begun during this short-lived intimacy—and as Jack later told an interviewer, he wrote On the Road as if he were writing a letter of autobiographical revelation for his wife.
When Kerouac returned to On the Road in April 1951, it was with a new determination to write the book quickly, directly, and without interruption—he announced that he would tape together a long roll of paper and “write it down as fast as I can, exactly like it happened” (Holmes, Nothing to Declare, p.78). The exact nature of that paper remains debated: Haverty remembered Kerouac finding tracing paper left by William Cannastra; Lucien Carr insisted he supplied Teletype rolls from his workplace; still others later described it as drafting or art paper. Kerouac himself gave varying accounts, but the surviving scroll shows that he measured and trimmed the sheets by hand before taping them into the long strip that fit his typewriter. Kerouac’s choice of the scroll format reflected his desire for total compositional flow, without page breaks or pauses. In practice, it allowed him to write in one enormous, unbroken paragraph, using real names and pushing aside traditional literary structure.
Beginning on April 2nd and fueled mainly by coffee, he typed for twenty days with astonishing intensity, first in the loft he shared with Joan and later in Lucien Carr’s apartment. Friends recalled the constant clatter of his typewriter and the astonishing length of the manuscript unfurling across the floor. Although some speculated he used Benzedrine, Kerouac insisted he composed the book on caffeine alone. In a letter to Ed White postmarked April 20th, he reported that he had "written 86,00 words almost finishing On the Road" (see lot 123 in the next sale). And by April 22nd, he had produced roughly 125,000 words—what he told Neal Cassady was a complete departure from anything he had written before, a manuscript that “rolled out on the floor” and “looked like a road.”
Kerouac viewed the entire effort as an experiment, a compositional maneuver meant to break through earlier blocks. Early readers reacted variously: John Clellon Holmes recognized immediately that Kerouac had created something powerful, reading it “like a Chinese scroll” and sensing its originality; Ginsberg admired parts but was initially unsure; Lucien Carr, blunt as always, dismissed it outright. But even at this early stage, the essential voice of On the Road had arrived.
After Kerouac finished the On the Road scroll, disaster nearly struck: Lucien Carr’s dog chewed up the final feet of the manuscript, forcing Kerouac to retype the section. While some later speculated that the dog story was a cover for Kerouac rewriting the ending deliberately, the truth remains uncertain—no original scroll ending survives, and contemporaneous letters suggest he was still searching for a suitable conclusion in early May 1951. A penciled note on the scroll (“DOG ATE (Potchky—a dog)”) and Carr’s own recollections confirm that at least some physical damage really did occur.
From Scroll to Book
The manuscript’s journey to publication was protracted and fraught. When Kerouac proudly unrolled the scroll before his editor Robert Giroux (then at Harcourt Brace), Giroux balked at its physical form and the impossibility of editing or printing from it; the meeting ended in a rupture, and Kerouac cut ties with the publisher. Over the next several years he prepared more conventional typescripts—including a 297-page version likely typed in San Francisco—and sent them to various publishers through friends and agents. All rejected it.
Kerouac complained that editors wanted a more traditional novel like The Town and the City, not something so “new and unusual.” He even experimented with renaming it Beat Generation to attract interest, but still met repeated refusals. Only after Sterling Lord became his agent, and after excerpts such as “The Mexican Girl” gained attention in literary magazines, did the situation begin to improve. Malcolm Cowley at Viking Press finally championed the manuscript, persuading editor Keith Jennison to take it seriously. But there were other hurdles: Kerouac had used the real names of his friends and had not disguised locations or events, and Viking’s lawyers became alarmed at the risk of libel suits. Kerouac protested to Cowley that libel suits were highly unlikely, but reluctantly, at the insistence of Viking’s lawyers, agreed to obtain signed releases against libel and defamation actions from Cassady, Ginsberg, and other friends who figured in the book. And, in December 1956, he wrote Jennison to assure him that he was scrupulously editing out any specific details which might be deemed offensive by even minor figures in the narrative.
As publication finally seemed possible, Kerouac—exhausted by years of rejection—became increasingly willing to revise On the Road. After briefly considering the title Rock and Roll Road, he accepted Malcolm Cowley’s advice to restore the original title and agreed to substantial editorial changes, including combining two of the cross-country trips to improve narrative flow. The scroll itself had been far longer—“about a third longer,” John Clellon Holmes noted—and Cowley believed it needed structural tightening, especially reducing its constant back-and-forth movement across the continent. Though Kerouac later insisted he never revised his spontaneous prose, Cowley maintained that Kerouac actually made “a good deal” of effective revision. Because Kerouac was in San Francisco during the final editing stages, Cowley ended up editing the manuscript largely on his own. According to editor Ellis Amburn, Kerouac accepted many of Cowley’s suggestions in theory but never incorporated them fully into the text, perhaps expecting they wouldn’t be noticed. But in the end, he would be ambushed by Viking’s copy department, which standardized his grammar, capitalization, punctuation, and syntax.
Road markings
In the scroll, hundreds of penciled authorial revision are visible. They include alterations in punctuation, usually the addition or deletion of commas; the addition of paragraph marks; numerous deletions of a single word, several words, or whole phrases; transpositions of word pairs (in describing Luanne Henderson, Kerouac changes “a pretty, sweet little thing” to “a sweet, pretty little thing”); and the interlinear and marginal additions of new text (in the famous early passage about Ginsberg and Cassady, the typed text "roman candles across the night" has Kerouac's penciled additions so that it becomes “yellow roman spider candles with blue centerlight across the night"). While there are several instances of name changes (“my mother” becomes “my aunt”, “Vicki” is changed to “Joan”), Kerouac uses the real names of others, including Neal Cassady, Luanne Henderson, Ed White, and Allen Ginsberg. Interestingly, certain passages bracketed or lined through in pencil here in the scroll do, in fact, appear in the first edition, one example being the description of Jack’s drunken binge in Boston (recalled during Jack and Neal’s brief visit to Detroit).
Textual differences between the scroll and the first edition are too numerous and complex to enumerate, but they are clear from the very first sentence—the famous opening of the published book reads: “I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.” In the scroll, the sentence reads: “I first met Neal not long after my father died.” Kerouac's father died from cancer in 1946.
The September 1957 Publication
When On the Road was published in September 1957, Kerouac was suddenly thrust from obscurity into national fame as the public face of the Beat Generation. Critics immediately recognized the book’s cultural impact: The New York Times reviewer Gilbert Millstein hailed its publication as a “historic occasion,” comparing Kerouac’s abrupt celebrity to Byron’s meteoric rise after Childe Harold. Millstein predicted both the dismissals and the praise the novel would receive, ultimately calling it the most important expression yet of the Beat movement—akin to what The Sun Also Rises had been for the Lost Generation. Other reviewers were less impressed: David Dempsey criticized the book’s structure as plotless and its characters as undeveloped, even while acknowledging its readability.
At Viking’s launch event, the scroll manuscript was theatrically unrolled before clamoring reporters, but Kerouac soon found the attention hollow, likening fame to “old newspapers blowing down Bleecker Street.” His search for meaning and connection in the face of this would feed into his next published work, The Dharma Bums (see Lot 128 in the following sale for the original scroll).
CONDITION
The first two feet with some tears and losses at edges, affecting a few of the outermost words and letters of text in approximately 60 lines, occasional mostly marginal tears or chips elsewhere, but the remainder of the scroll in generally very good condition, clear and readable throughout. Slight yellowing to the beginning, the extreme edges, and to seams where originally joined by Kerouac, minor yellowing from old tape repairs in a few places. Lacking final portion (last part of Mexico trip and Part Five epilogue, comprising approximately 25 pages in the 293-page Penguin edition. This missing segment was chewed and torn away by a dog belonging to Kerouac’s friend Lucien Carr in April or May 1951. At the end is a partly effaced pencil note by Kerouac “[DOG] ATE ([Potch]ky-a dog)..” Conservation: Beginning of text remargined and with a few repaired tears, other tears and losses neatly mended from the back with Japanese tissue, blank leader of tissue added at end. Preserved on two modern Plexiglas spools in a custom clamshell box.
REFERENCES
Amburn, Elis. Subterranean Kerouac. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.
Beat Journey, The. California, Pa.: Tuvoti, 1978.
Brinkley, Douglas. “The Kerouac Papers,” in The Atlantic Monthly, November 1998, pp. 49-76.
Cassady, Neal. The First Third & Other Writings. Rev. edn. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1981.
Charters, Ann. A Bibliography of the Works of Jack Kerouac. New York: The Phoenix Book Shop, 1975.
Charters, Ann. Kerouac: A Biography. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1973.
Charters, Ann, ed. The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Viking Penguin, 1992.
Charters, Ann, ed. The Portable Jack Kerouac. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.
Ginsberg, Allen. Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995. New York: Harper Collins, 1990.
Ginsberg, Allen and Neal Cassady. As Ever: The Collected Correspondence of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. Berkeley Creative Arts Book Company, 1977
Gifford, Barry and Lawrence Lee, eds. Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978.
Hunt, Tim. Kerouac's Crooked Road: The Development of a Fiction. Foreword by Ann Charters. Berkeley, Cal.: Univ. of California Press, 1981, repr. 1996.
Johnson, Joyce. Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir. Introduction by Ann Douglas. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983; Rev. ed. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.
Johnson, Joyce and Jack Kerouac. Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958. Introduction and Commentary by Joyce Johnson. New York: Viking Penguin, 2000.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Viking Press, 1957; Repr. Penguin Books, 1999.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road: the Original Scroll. Edited by Howard Cunnell. New York: Viking, 2007.
Kerouac, Jack. Selected Letters, 1940-1956, ed. Ann Charters. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.
Kerouac, Jack. Selected Letters, 1957-1969, ed. Ann Charters. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.
Kerouac, Joan Haverty. Nobody’s Wife: The Smart Aleck and the King of the Beats. Introduction by Jan Kerouac. Foreword by Ann Charters. Berkeley, Ca.: Creative Arts Book Co., 1995.
McDarrah, Fred W., ed. Kerouac and Friends: A Beat Generation Album. New York: William Morrow, 1985.
Miles, Barry. Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1998.
Moore, Dave. “On the Road—The Scroll Revealed,” in The Kerouac Connection, no. 10, April 1986, pp.3-8.
Petrusich, Amanda. "A Slightly Embarrassing Love for Jack Kerouac." The New Yorker. 15 March 2018.
Philips, Lisa, ed. Beat Culture and the New America, 1950-1965. Whitney Museum of American Art. New York and Paris: Flammarion, 1996.
Tytell, John. Naked Angels: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs. New York: Grove Press, 1976.
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“I’ve telled all the road now. Went fast because road is fast ... wrote whole thing on strip of paper 120 foot long ... just rolled it through typewriter and in fact no paragraphs ... rolled it out on floor and it looks like a road...”
—Jack Kerouac to Neal Cassady, 22 May 1951
The Original Scroll: a 20th-century Masterpiece
In April 1951, in a loft on West 21st Street, Jack Kerouac threaded a continuous roll of taped tracing paper into his typewriter and over twenty days produced the legendary On the Road scroll—an unbroken torrent of language running nearly 120 feet that captured, with unprecedented immediacy, the velocity of postwar American life and its so-called Beat Generation. Fueled by caffeine and armed with the stories from his cross-country road trips, it was an effort to tell everything, all at once. The format was integral to the method: the scroll eliminated pauses and enabled a compositional flow that followed thought and sensation in real time. The result was not a conventional working draft but—after years of false starts—the decisive moment when Kerouac’s voice, subject, and technique fused into a form that altered American prose. In the words of Howard Cunnell, the On the Road scroll is “among the most significant, celebrated, and provocative artifacts in contemporary American literary history.”
On the Road remains the most popular of Kerouac’s works, with its portrayal of a semi-nomadic subculture strikingly at variance with the conformist and materialistic American culture of the 1950s. To those who chose to reject the simplistic formulations of commercialized mass culture and embrace what they saw as a new, unflinching truthfulness, the Beat movement held the promise of heightened sensation, enhanced perception and a transforming sense of the potential of the individual. John Clellon Holmes, a member of Kerouac’s circle and author of the early Beat novel Go, described the sense of excitement in the air in the early 1950s: “Everyone I knew felt it in one way or another—that bottled eagerness for talk, for joy, for excitement, for sensation, for new truths. Whatever the reason, everyone of my age had a look of impatience and expectation in his eyes that bespoke ungiven love, unreleased ecstasy and the presence of buried worlds within.” The novel is a time capsule of not only the headiness but also the prejudices of its time; despite this, it continues to speak to generations of readers. New Yorker writer Amanda Petrusich has explored this complexity and acknowledges: "Yet the way that novel is so enduring—so impervious to shifting cultural winds—seems to indicate something about how successfully it articulates a very American rootlessness..."
In that 20-day stint at the typewriter that has become part of literary lore, Kerouac created a work so unique in its form and radical in its narrative that it was summarily rejected by a string of generally innovative editors and publishers. But Kerouac continued to write, voluminously. In the six years between the creation of the On the Road scroll and the book’s 1957 publication, he completed at least eleven books and a large quantity of poetry and prose, refining the technique he later termed “spontaneous writing” or “sketching,” which has been equated to the sinuous lines of modern jazz (which Kerouac loved) and to the drip technique of the painter Jackson Pollock, Kerouac’s contemporary. As one critic has noted, Kerouac’s “spontaneous bop prosody” (as Ginsberg termed it) “created an action painting of the word.”
The On the Road scroll composed in 1951 and the novel as it was eventually published in 1957 differ in form, tone, and structure. The scroll is a single, unbroken paragraph—raw, fast, unedited, uncensored, notably using the real names of Kerouac’s friends. The first edition—shaped by legal concerns, editorial guidance, and the constraints of conventional book production—was divided into chapters, heavily punctuated, and softened in places. Pseudonyms replaced real names; episodes were reordered, condensed, or combined; and some of the linguistic wildness was toned down. What emerged in print was a more coherent, marketable novel, but one that inevitably muted the raw velocity and unfiltered truthfulness that make the scroll a 20th-century masterpiece.
“Aimer, travailler, souffir”
Jack Kerouac, born Jean-Louis Kerouac in 1922 to French-Canadian parents in Lowell, Massachusetts, grew up in a tightly knit immigrant family shaped by the motto “aimer, travailler, souffrir” (“love, work, suffer”). A gifted athlete and early writer—even though English was his second language—he decided in adolescence to become both a novelist and an adventurer, inspired by Jack London. After attending Horace Mann on a football scholarship, he entered Columbia University in 1940, where exposure to jazz and the novels of Thomas Wolfe helped form his literary sensibility.
Disillusioned with school, Kerouac left Columbia and served in the Merchant Marine and briefly in the Navy during World War II; at sea, reading Galsworthy’s 1922 The Forsyte Saga planted the idea for the autobiographical series he later called The Duluoz Legend. In 1944, back in New York, through his friend Lucien Carr, he met Allen Ginsberg, at the time a young poet, and William S. Burroughs, who had not yet become a writer. Their meeting marked the coalescence of the three most important literary figures of the still embryonic Beat movement, and the powerful creative connections between them and others in their circle, including the novelist John Clellon Holmes, were key factors in the artistic and philosophical directions in which the movement would evolve. After the death of his father in 1946, Kerouac began work on his first novel, The Town and the City, published in 1950. As recounted in the opening of On the Road, Jack’s friends Hal Chase and Ed White showed Jack a letter they had received from Neal Cassady, “a young jailkid shrouded in mystery,” written from a reform school in New Mexico. Finally, in December 1946 “news came that Dean [Neal] was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first time.” Although he left New York again in March, Cassady’s effect upon Kerouac was powerful; they bonded over shared ambition, restlessness, and a fascination with the American landscape and its possibilities. Their early correspondence shows an intense, reciprocal fascination, and on July 17th, Kerouac left New York for his first trip on the road.
Stops and Starts
Beginning in 1948, Kerouac struggled through multiple abandoned drafts of the novel that eventually became On the Road. His earliest conception, outlined in a 1948 letter, was an "American-scene picaresque” about two hitchhiking boys crossing the country, working odd jobs, and returning home disillusioned. These early fragments ranged from autobiographical, Wolfe-like attempts to raffish narratives with entirely different protagonists, and none captured the voice he sought. He experimented with titles and structures and envisioned the book as part of a much larger autobiographical cycle. But by late 1950 he was deeply discouraged, telling Neal Cassady that he could not yet summon the authentic, transformed voice he felt his road experiences demanded—a crisis that persisted until the breakthrough of the 1951 scroll.
Neal Cassady and William Burroughs
Kerouac saw in Neal Cassady the ideal modern outlaw-hero—charismatic, reckless, intellectually electric—who would become Dean Moriarty, one of the most enduring characters in American fiction. Their crisscrossing journeys between 1947 and 1950—New York to Denver, California, New Orleans, San Francisco, and finally deep into Mexico—would form the narrative spine of On the Road. These trips were marked by exhilaration, abandonment, and revelation: Cassady’s unpredictable departures left Kerouac alternately inspired and wounded, while Kerouac’s own return from Mexico, weakened and introspective, included the pivotal encounter with a mysterious old man who urged him to “go moan for man.” By the time he returned to New York in the autumn of 1950, Kerouac was shuttling between his mother’s home in Ozone Park and the ferment of Manhattan’s Beat circle, spending days writing and restless nights seeking companionship and creative energy that would soon carry him into the writing of the On the Road scroll.
Cassady played a decisive role in helping Kerouac discover his mature voice. Everyone who knew Cassady remarked on his uncanny gift for talk: long, free-flowing, wildly associative monologues that blended storytelling, philosophy, social commentary, and sensory detail. His wife, Carolyn, described his obsession with stretching sentences to their limit, while others recalled being overwhelmed by the sheer vitality of his speech.
Encouraged by Kerouac and Ginsberg, Cassady began typing autobiographical pieces and long letters, but it was his extraordinary 40-page “Joan Anderson letter” of December 1950—written during a three-day Benzedrine high—that electrified Kerouac (see Lot 122 in the following sale for Kerouac's discussion of this in a letter to Ed White). Its raw honesty, speed, and uninhibited narrative style revealed to Kerouac the kind of spontaneous, truthful writing he had been striving for. He considered it one of the greatest pieces of American prose he had ever read and now recognized Cassady—not Wolfe—as his true stylistic model.
The letter became the catalyst for Kerouac’s breakthrough: it sparked the freer, faster style of On the Road and the “spontaneous prose” method he would use for years. Kerouac immediately began writing long, experimental letters back to Cassady, practicing this new voice; within days he declared that they were inaugurating “a little American Renaissance” and that he had abandoned conventional fiction in favor of pure truth-telling (Kerouac to Cassady, 28 December 1950).
At about the same time, the typescript of William Burroughs’s first novel, Junkie, was being circulated among his New York circle. Kerouac read it in the West 21st Street loft and it, too, made a strong impression on him. William S. Burroughs’s Junkie offered a counterbalance—its flat, factual tone tempered Cassady’s exuberance, steering Kerouac toward a more direct, first-person narrative approach. Together, Cassady’s manic freedom and Burroughs’s stripped-down clarity would shape his style.
Composition
During a visit to Manhattan on November 3, 1950, Jack Kerouac had attended a party at Lucien Carr’s loft on West 21st Street, where he met Joan Haverty, a young dress designer who had lived next door with the late William Cannastra. Their meeting—retold in On the Road—was immediate and intense, and within two weeks they impulsively married. The day after their wedding, Kerouac moved his roll-top desk and typewriter into Joan’s spacious loft, arranging a simple work area beside their bed. It was in this large, open studio—its improvised living and working zones divided by low cabinets—that Kerouac settled into the environment where the scroll would take shape. And although they would separate within seven short months, the scroll of Kerouac’s On the Road was begun during this short-lived intimacy—and as Jack later told an interviewer, he wrote On the Road as if he were writing a letter of autobiographical revelation for his wife.
When Kerouac returned to On the Road in April 1951, it was with a new determination to write the book quickly, directly, and without interruption—he announced that he would tape together a long roll of paper and “write it down as fast as I can, exactly like it happened” (Holmes, Nothing to Declare, p.78). The exact nature of that paper remains debated: Haverty remembered Kerouac finding tracing paper left by William Cannastra; Lucien Carr insisted he supplied Teletype rolls from his workplace; still others later described it as drafting or art paper. Kerouac himself gave varying accounts, but the surviving scroll shows that he measured and trimmed the sheets by hand before taping them into the long strip that fit his typewriter. Kerouac’s choice of the scroll format reflected his desire for total compositional flow, without page breaks or pauses. In practice, it allowed him to write in one enormous, unbroken paragraph, using real names and pushing aside traditional literary structure.
Beginning on April 2nd and fueled mainly by coffee, he typed for twenty days with astonishing intensity, first in the loft he shared with Joan and later in Lucien Carr’s apartment. Friends recalled the constant clatter of his typewriter and the astonishing length of the manuscript unfurling across the floor. Although some speculated he used Benzedrine, Kerouac insisted he composed the book on caffeine alone. In a letter to Ed White postmarked April 20th, he reported that he had "written 86,00 words almost finishing On the Road" (see lot 123 in the next sale). And by April 22nd, he had produced roughly 125,000 words—what he told Neal Cassady was a complete departure from anything he had written before, a manuscript that “rolled out on the floor” and “looked like a road.”
Kerouac viewed the entire effort as an experiment, a compositional maneuver meant to break through earlier blocks. Early readers reacted variously: John Clellon Holmes recognized immediately that Kerouac had created something powerful, reading it “like a Chinese scroll” and sensing its originality; Ginsberg admired parts but was initially unsure; Lucien Carr, blunt as always, dismissed it outright. But even at this early stage, the essential voice of On the Road had arrived.
After Kerouac finished the On the Road scroll, disaster nearly struck: Lucien Carr’s dog chewed up the final feet of the manuscript, forcing Kerouac to retype the section. While some later speculated that the dog story was a cover for Kerouac rewriting the ending deliberately, the truth remains uncertain—no original scroll ending survives, and contemporaneous letters suggest he was still searching for a suitable conclusion in early May 1951. A penciled note on the scroll (“DOG ATE (Potchky—a dog)”) and Carr’s own recollections confirm that at least some physical damage really did occur.
From Scroll to Book
The manuscript’s journey to publication was protracted and fraught. When Kerouac proudly unrolled the scroll before his editor Robert Giroux (then at Harcourt Brace), Giroux balked at its physical form and the impossibility of editing or printing from it; the meeting ended in a rupture, and Kerouac cut ties with the publisher. Over the next several years he prepared more conventional typescripts—including a 297-page version likely typed in San Francisco—and sent them to various publishers through friends and agents. All rejected it.
Kerouac complained that editors wanted a more traditional novel like The Town and the City, not something so “new and unusual.” He even experimented with renaming it Beat Generation to attract interest, but still met repeated refusals. Only after Sterling Lord became his agent, and after excerpts such as “The Mexican Girl” gained attention in literary magazines, did the situation begin to improve. Malcolm Cowley at Viking Press finally championed the manuscript, persuading editor Keith Jennison to take it seriously. But there were other hurdles: Kerouac had used the real names of his friends and had not disguised locations or events, and Viking’s lawyers became alarmed at the risk of libel suits. Kerouac protested to Cowley that libel suits were highly unlikely, but reluctantly, at the insistence of Viking’s lawyers, agreed to obtain signed releases against libel and defamation actions from Cassady, Ginsberg, and other friends who figured in the book. And, in December 1956, he wrote Jennison to assure him that he was scrupulously editing out any specific details which might be deemed offensive by even minor figures in the narrative.
As publication finally seemed possible, Kerouac—exhausted by years of rejection—became increasingly willing to revise On the Road. After briefly considering the title Rock and Roll Road, he accepted Malcolm Cowley’s advice to restore the original title and agreed to substantial editorial changes, including combining two of the cross-country trips to improve narrative flow. The scroll itself had been far longer—“about a third longer,” John Clellon Holmes noted—and Cowley believed it needed structural tightening, especially reducing its constant back-and-forth movement across the continent. Though Kerouac later insisted he never revised his spontaneous prose, Cowley maintained that Kerouac actually made “a good deal” of effective revision. Because Kerouac was in San Francisco during the final editing stages, Cowley ended up editing the manuscript largely on his own. According to editor Ellis Amburn, Kerouac accepted many of Cowley’s suggestions in theory but never incorporated them fully into the text, perhaps expecting they wouldn’t be noticed. But in the end, he would be ambushed by Viking’s copy department, which standardized his grammar, capitalization, punctuation, and syntax.
Road markings
In the scroll, hundreds of penciled authorial revision are visible. They include alterations in punctuation, usually the addition or deletion of commas; the addition of paragraph marks; numerous deletions of a single word, several words, or whole phrases; transpositions of word pairs (in describing Luanne Henderson, Kerouac changes “a pretty, sweet little thing” to “a sweet, pretty little thing”); and the interlinear and marginal additions of new text (in the famous early passage about Ginsberg and Cassady, the typed text "roman candles across the night" has Kerouac's penciled additions so that it becomes “yellow roman spider candles with blue centerlight across the night"). While there are several instances of name changes (“my mother” becomes “my aunt”, “Vicki” is changed to “Joan”), Kerouac uses the real names of others, including Neal Cassady, Luanne Henderson, Ed White, and Allen Ginsberg. Interestingly, certain passages bracketed or lined through in pencil here in the scroll do, in fact, appear in the first edition, one example being the description of Jack’s drunken binge in Boston (recalled during Jack and Neal’s brief visit to Detroit).
Textual differences between the scroll and the first edition are too numerous and complex to enumerate, but they are clear from the very first sentence—the famous opening of the published book reads: “I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.” In the scroll, the sentence reads: “I first met Neal not long after my father died.” Kerouac's father died from cancer in 1946.
The September 1957 Publication
When On the Road was published in September 1957, Kerouac was suddenly thrust from obscurity into national fame as the public face of the Beat Generation. Critics immediately recognized the book’s cultural impact: The New York Times reviewer Gilbert Millstein hailed its publication as a “historic occasion,” comparing Kerouac’s abrupt celebrity to Byron’s meteoric rise after Childe Harold. Millstein predicted both the dismissals and the praise the novel would receive, ultimately calling it the most important expression yet of the Beat movement—akin to what The Sun Also Rises had been for the Lost Generation. Other reviewers were less impressed: David Dempsey criticized the book’s structure as plotless and its characters as undeveloped, even while acknowledging its readability.
At Viking’s launch event, the scroll manuscript was theatrically unrolled before clamoring reporters, but Kerouac soon found the attention hollow, likening fame to “old newspapers blowing down Bleecker Street.” His search for meaning and connection in the face of this would feed into his next published work, The Dharma Bums (see Lot 128 in the following sale for the original scroll).
CONDITION
The first two feet with some tears and losses at edges, affecting a few of the outermost words and letters of text in approximately 60 lines, occasional mostly marginal tears or chips elsewhere, but the remainder of the scroll in generally very good condition, clear and readable throughout. Slight yellowing to the beginning, the extreme edges, and to seams where originally joined by Kerouac, minor yellowing from old tape repairs in a few places. Lacking final portion (last part of Mexico trip and Part Five epilogue, comprising approximately 25 pages in the 293-page Penguin edition. This missing segment was chewed and torn away by a dog belonging to Kerouac’s friend Lucien Carr in April or May 1951. At the end is a partly effaced pencil note by Kerouac “[DOG] ATE ([Potch]ky-a dog)..” Conservation: Beginning of text remargined and with a few repaired tears, other tears and losses neatly mended from the back with Japanese tissue, blank leader of tissue added at end. Preserved on two modern Plexiglas spools in a custom clamshell box.
REFERENCES
Amburn, Elis. Subterranean Kerouac. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.
Beat Journey, The. California, Pa.: Tuvoti, 1978.
Brinkley, Douglas. “The Kerouac Papers,” in The Atlantic Monthly, November 1998, pp. 49-76.
Cassady, Neal. The First Third & Other Writings. Rev. edn. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1981.
Charters, Ann. A Bibliography of the Works of Jack Kerouac. New York: The Phoenix Book Shop, 1975.
Charters, Ann. Kerouac: A Biography. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1973.
Charters, Ann, ed. The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Viking Penguin, 1992.
Charters, Ann, ed. The Portable Jack Kerouac. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.
Ginsberg, Allen. Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995. New York: Harper Collins, 1990.
Ginsberg, Allen and Neal Cassady. As Ever: The Collected Correspondence of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. Berkeley Creative Arts Book Company, 1977
Gifford, Barry and Lawrence Lee, eds. Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978.
Hunt, Tim. Kerouac's Crooked Road: The Development of a Fiction. Foreword by Ann Charters. Berkeley, Cal.: Univ. of California Press, 1981, repr. 1996.
Johnson, Joyce. Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir. Introduction by Ann Douglas. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983; Rev. ed. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.
Johnson, Joyce and Jack Kerouac. Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958. Introduction and Commentary by Joyce Johnson. New York: Viking Penguin, 2000.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Viking Press, 1957; Repr. Penguin Books, 1999.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road: the Original Scroll. Edited by Howard Cunnell. New York: Viking, 2007.
Kerouac, Jack. Selected Letters, 1940-1956, ed. Ann Charters. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.
Kerouac, Jack. Selected Letters, 1957-1969, ed. Ann Charters. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.
Kerouac, Joan Haverty. Nobody’s Wife: The Smart Aleck and the King of the Beats. Introduction by Jan Kerouac. Foreword by Ann Charters. Berkeley, Ca.: Creative Arts Book Co., 1995.
McDarrah, Fred W., ed. Kerouac and Friends: A Beat Generation Album. New York: William Morrow, 1985.
Miles, Barry. Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1998.
Moore, Dave. “On the Road—The Scroll Revealed,” in The Kerouac Connection, no. 10, April 1986, pp.3-8.
Petrusich, Amanda. "A Slightly Embarrassing Love for Jack Kerouac." The New Yorker. 15 March 2018.
Philips, Lisa, ed. Beat Culture and the New America, 1950-1965. Whitney Museum of American Art. New York and Paris: Flammarion, 1996.
Tytell, John. Naked Angels: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs. New York: Grove Press, 1976.