On the Road

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