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On the Road

GMD	BOOK
Classification	F KER
Publisher	Penguin UK, 2008
Subject	FictionAmericaTravelPost World War IIBeat GenerationNew YorkCaliforniaSan Francisco
Description	'The sparse and unassuming scroll is the living version for our time' Luc Sante, The New York Times Fifty years after its original publication, Kerouac's road epic - types on one continuous scroll in only three weeks - is published for the first time as the author intended, complete with real names, places, and scandalous details. In this influential odyssey of jazz and drugs, of filling stations and marriage licenses, of sex, and poolsharks, and hiballs, Kerouac tells the real story of his travels with car thief and Beat icon Neal Cassady, and the famous friends they met, drank with, and ignored. A record of his journeys across the great American Landscape, On the Road: The Original Scroll is also a testimony to Kerouac's constant obsession with the ill-fated Cassady himself. 'An unusual peep behind the scenes at a classic novel in a state of undress' James Campbell, The Times Literary Supplement The novel was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005
ISBN	9780141189215
Additional ISBN	0141189215
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Notes

Jack Kerouac began thinking about the novel that was to become On the Road as early as 1947, and over the following three years he, along with Neal Cassady and a few other friends, made the cross-country journeys that were to become the raw material for the book. During this time Kerouac filled his journals with notes and drafts in which he tested out different possible main characters and situations. After coming under the spell of some wildly exuberant letters that Cassady sent to him in late 1950 and early 1951, Kerouac finally decided that the best way to do the novel would be to write the story of his life, to "write it as it happened". In three weeks in April Manhattan, he composed a version that was satisfactory to him. It was typed out as one long single-spaced paragraph on eight sheets of tracing paper that he later taped together to form a 120-foot scroll. It was not until more than six years later, and several new drafts, that Viking, on September 5, 1957, published the book that is known to us today.

Here, on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, is the never-before-published original scroll edition of On the Road. It represents the first full expression of Kerouac's revolutionary aesthetic, the identifiable point at which his thematic vision and narrative voice came together in a sustained burst of creative energy. The original version of On the Road is rougher, wilder, and more sexually explicit than the published novel. Kerouac also uses the real names of his friends, including Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, and this adds to the text's powerful and intimate immediacy.