On the Road: the Original Scroll

(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Author Jack Kerouac

Introduction by Howard Cunnell , Penny Vlagopoulos , George Mouratidis and Joshua Kupetz

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

“The sparse and unassuming scroll is the living version [of On the Road] for our time. . . . It is a dazzling piece of writing.”—The New York Times Book Review

During three weeks in 1951, Jack Kerouac wrote the first draft of On the Road—typed as a long, single-spaced paragraph on eight sheets of tracing paper, which he taped together to form a scroll. Representing the identifiable point at which his vision and narrative voice first came together in a sustained burst of creative energy, the scroll is the “uncut” version of Kerouac’s masterpiece—rougher, wilder, and more sexually explicit than the edited work that appeared in…

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the “Beat generation” and made Kerouac one of the most best-known writers of his time. Publication of many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur. Kerouac considered all of his…