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Books in Canada
At the very end of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, his mid-20th century chronicle-novel-memoir of the Beat Generation, there’s a phrase that has stuck in my mind. It occurs in the book’s long concluding lyrical riff about the flow of daily life, the melancholy of time and memory, and the geographic immensity of the American continent in which our minute trails of wandering are scratched. It goes: “. . . and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old . . .”
That memento mori of a thought and the landmark book in which it appears was published precisely 50 years ago, give or take a couple of weeks. A half-century later, we do in fact know what happened, at least to almost everybody in On the Road, and for the no doubt dwindling band of us who read Kerouac’s book in its crisp first edition, we have long since donned the “forlorn rags of growing old.”
The 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road has been marked by a small spate of memorabilia, including a new edition of the 1957 book, a Library of America volume collecting Kerouac’s early novels, John Leland’s Why Kerouac Matters, a reissue of Joyce Johnson’s sober Beat memoir, Minor Characters, and Canadian novelist Ray Robertson’s vivid imagining of Kerouac’s post-Road farewell journey, What Happened Later (reviewed elsewhere in these pages). Perhaps most interesting of all, Kerouac’s publisher, Viking, has issued a book version of the now legendary “scroll” on which Kerouac composed the first draft of On the Road in 1951. I’ll get to that in a minute.
But first, like a slightly embarrassed Ancient Mariner tugging at the Wedding Guest’s sleeve, I have a little literary tale to tell. I first read Kerouac’s On the Road because of a decidedly negative book review. I was sixteen years old, a highschool student in Chicago, Illinois, with literary aspirations. An older relative of mine, perhaps recognizing a budding artistic sensibility, had given me a subscription to The Saturday Review of Literature (the Books in Canada of its day). That’s where, in autumn 1957, I read a review of Jack Kerouac’s recently published On the Road. The reviewer (who can be allowed the obscurity of namelessness) just hated it, describing Kerouac’s stories of his and his friends’ madcap adventures across America as tiresome, amateurish, and jejune (I had to look up “jejune” in the dictionary).
However, the reviewer made one big mistake. To underscore his critical point, he quoted sizeable chunks of Kerouac’s breathless prose. In one passage, the book’s narrator, Sal Paradise, recounting the story of the novel’s hero, Dean Moriarty, and his many road companions, declares that:
“. . . they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”
Those quotes were enough. Since the mid-20th century was still an age of literacy, I had read books by most of the major contemporary writers and I’d never seen prose quite like the quoted paragraphs of Jack Kerouac. I didn’t hesitate. I put down the magazine with its hatchet job on Kerouac, got on the neighbourhood bus, and went straight downtown to Chicago’s biggest bookstore, Kroch and Brentano’s, to buy a copy of the book. Within the hour, reading the opening pages of On the Road on the bus home, I was in Jack Kerouac’s America.
It was an America different from the one portrayed in two contemporaneous critical novels about the country, Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, about the constrictions of corporate life, and Grace Metalious’s steamy bestseller, Peyton Place, a potboiler whose lusts exploded the myth of sedate small town life. Instead, Kerouac wrote about a generation of young men just a couple of years younger than their immediate literary forebears, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and James Jones, whose lives and writing had been shaped by World War II. Kerouac’s road buddies were spiritual seekers-of experience, of the Zeitgeist, of a meaningful life outside the orthodoxies of corporations and conventional suburban living. Its notions of adventure and the possibility of a movement or generation one might join were immensely appealing to an adolescent; so too were the intimations of sex, jazz, and various intoxicants. Most important was its post-war existential insistence that the meaning of life was to be found in the urgent intensity of living it.
As it turned out, through accidents of geography, circumstance, and temperament, I became friends with Ginsberg whom, until his death in 1997, I regarded as one of my teachers, in life as well as in literature. I also got to know, however peripherally, most of the other writers of the Beat Generation, including the hero of On the Road, “Dean Moriarty”, who was in real life Neal Cassady (though by the time I met him much of his fabled youthful charm had worn off). The only one I didn’t meet in person was Kerouac himself, but I never forgot his generosity. I followed his work and, inevitably, the rumours of his unhappy personal decline, which ended in his death at age 47 in 1969, a mere dozen years after the publication of his most famous novel.
Today, On the Road, is a “modern classic”, and though its romanticism has perhaps frayed, and the writing has worn a bit less well than might have been hoped, it’s still surprisingly readable. It also stands as one of the three generation-naming-and-defining North American novels of the 20th century, along with Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Douglas Coupland’s Generation X. Because of its status, and the myths that have grown up around it, that makes the publication of On the Road: The Original Scroll (Viking, 2007), intelligently edited and introduced by British writer Howard Cunnell, both informative and useful.
The myth of On the Road is that Kerouac wrote it on a single roll of teletype paper, unpunctuated, in a white-hot, Benzedrine-fuelled rush, and that it had been mangled into the form of a conventional (read: less exciting, less authentic) novel by the straightlaced (read: “square”, “uptight”) editors in New York who published it a full half-dozen years after its composition. Like most literary myths, this one contains various grains of truth and half-truth, all of which editor Cunnell efficiently sorts out for us.
The brief version is this. There was and is a “scroll”, not of a single roll of teletype paper but of pieces of paper Kerouac taped together. The text is unparagraphed, but pretty much conventionally punctuated (and Kerouac himself formatted it into chapters and paragraphs in subsequent drafts). It was written in a rapid three weeks in April 1951, but the chemical stimulants, according to Kerouac, were no stronger than coffee. And it was a hard sell. Before it was published six years later, Kerouac had reeled off an additional half-dozen (also unpublished) books.
The interesting thing about “the original scroll” is that it’s pretty close to the eventually published book. The editors toned down some of the references to homosexuality (a subject Kerouac was squeamish about in any case), figuring that the drugs, jazz, and heterosexual bedhopping were more than enough “kicks” for readers of the day. They also slightly slowed the pace by inserting various commas here and there, but other than that, any claim that Kerouac’s intentions or his “spontaneous” prose were distorted by his editors is false.
There’s one difference between the scroll and the published book. The scroll uses the real names of the people in the story. What that does is to change the genre of the book. On the Road: The Original Scroll is a memoir rather than the “autobiographical” novel it became. Kerouac didn’t have to “make it up”; it all happened mostly as Kerouac told it during those magical weeks of spring 1951. In the end, the differences don’t matter all that much, though it’s nice to get an answer to the question so frequently asked of novelists, “How autobiographical is it?” In this case, the answer is: “Totally.”
Stan Persky (Books in Canada)
That memento mori of a thought and the landmark book in which it appears was published precisely 50 years ago, give or take a couple of weeks. A half-century later, we do in fact know what happened, at least to almost everybody in On the Road, and for the no doubt dwindling band of us who read Kerouac’s book in its crisp first edition, we have long since donned the “forlorn rags of growing old.”
The 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road has been marked by a small spate of memorabilia, including a new edition of the 1957 book, a Library of America volume collecting Kerouac’s early novels, John Leland’s Why Kerouac Matters, a reissue of Joyce Johnson’s sober Beat memoir, Minor Characters, and Canadian novelist Ray Robertson’s vivid imagining of Kerouac’s post-Road farewell journey, What Happened Later (reviewed elsewhere in these pages). Perhaps most interesting of all, Kerouac’s publisher, Viking, has issued a book version of the now legendary “scroll” on which Kerouac composed the first draft of On the Road in 1951. I’ll get to that in a minute.
But first, like a slightly embarrassed Ancient Mariner tugging at the Wedding Guest’s sleeve, I have a little literary tale to tell. I first read Kerouac’s On the Road because of a decidedly negative book review. I was sixteen years old, a highschool student in Chicago, Illinois, with literary aspirations. An older relative of mine, perhaps recognizing a budding artistic sensibility, had given me a subscription to The Saturday Review of Literature (the Books in Canada of its day). That’s where, in autumn 1957, I read a review of Jack Kerouac’s recently published On the Road. The reviewer (who can be allowed the obscurity of namelessness) just hated it, describing Kerouac’s stories of his and his friends’ madcap adventures across America as tiresome, amateurish, and jejune (I had to look up “jejune” in the dictionary).
However, the reviewer made one big mistake. To underscore his critical point, he quoted sizeable chunks of Kerouac’s breathless prose. In one passage, the book’s narrator, Sal Paradise, recounting the story of the novel’s hero, Dean Moriarty, and his many road companions, declares that:
“. . . they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”
Those quotes were enough. Since the mid-20th century was still an age of literacy, I had read books by most of the major contemporary writers and I’d never seen prose quite like the quoted paragraphs of Jack Kerouac. I didn’t hesitate. I put down the magazine with its hatchet job on Kerouac, got on the neighbourhood bus, and went straight downtown to Chicago’s biggest bookstore, Kroch and Brentano’s, to buy a copy of the book. Within the hour, reading the opening pages of On the Road on the bus home, I was in Jack Kerouac’s America.
It was an America different from the one portrayed in two contemporaneous critical novels about the country, Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, about the constrictions of corporate life, and Grace Metalious’s steamy bestseller, Peyton Place, a potboiler whose lusts exploded the myth of sedate small town life. Instead, Kerouac wrote about a generation of young men just a couple of years younger than their immediate literary forebears, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and James Jones, whose lives and writing had been shaped by World War II. Kerouac’s road buddies were spiritual seekers-of experience, of the Zeitgeist, of a meaningful life outside the orthodoxies of corporations and conventional suburban living. Its notions of adventure and the possibility of a movement or generation one might join were immensely appealing to an adolescent; so too were the intimations of sex, jazz, and various intoxicants. Most important was its post-war existential insistence that the meaning of life was to be found in the urgent intensity of living it.
As it turned out, through accidents of geography, circumstance, and temperament, I became friends with Ginsberg whom, until his death in 1997, I regarded as one of my teachers, in life as well as in literature. I also got to know, however peripherally, most of the other writers of the Beat Generation, including the hero of On the Road, “Dean Moriarty”, who was in real life Neal Cassady (though by the time I met him much of his fabled youthful charm had worn off). The only one I didn’t meet in person was Kerouac himself, but I never forgot his generosity. I followed his work and, inevitably, the rumours of his unhappy personal decline, which ended in his death at age 47 in 1969, a mere dozen years after the publication of his most famous novel.
Today, On the Road, is a “modern classic”, and though its romanticism has perhaps frayed, and the writing has worn a bit less well than might have been hoped, it’s still surprisingly readable. It also stands as one of the three generation-naming-and-defining North American novels of the 20th century, along with Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Douglas Coupland’s Generation X. Because of its status, and the myths that have grown up around it, that makes the publication of On the Road: The Original Scroll (Viking, 2007), intelligently edited and introduced by British writer Howard Cunnell, both informative and useful.
The myth of On the Road is that Kerouac wrote it on a single roll of teletype paper, unpunctuated, in a white-hot, Benzedrine-fuelled rush, and that it had been mangled into the form of a conventional (read: less exciting, less authentic) novel by the straightlaced (read: “square”, “uptight”) editors in New York who published it a full half-dozen years after its composition. Like most literary myths, this one contains various grains of truth and half-truth, all of which editor Cunnell efficiently sorts out for us.
The brief version is this. There was and is a “scroll”, not of a single roll of teletype paper but of pieces of paper Kerouac taped together. The text is unparagraphed, but pretty much conventionally punctuated (and Kerouac himself formatted it into chapters and paragraphs in subsequent drafts). It was written in a rapid three weeks in April 1951, but the chemical stimulants, according to Kerouac, were no stronger than coffee. And it was a hard sell. Before it was published six years later, Kerouac had reeled off an additional half-dozen (also unpublished) books.
The interesting thing about “the original scroll” is that it’s pretty close to the eventually published book. The editors toned down some of the references to homosexuality (a subject Kerouac was squeamish about in any case), figuring that the drugs, jazz, and heterosexual bedhopping were more than enough “kicks” for readers of the day. They also slightly slowed the pace by inserting various commas here and there, but other than that, any claim that Kerouac’s intentions or his “spontaneous” prose were distorted by his editors is false.
There’s one difference between the scroll and the published book. The scroll uses the real names of the people in the story. What that does is to change the genre of the book. On the Road: The Original Scroll is a memoir rather than the “autobiographical” novel it became. Kerouac didn’t have to “make it up”; it all happened mostly as Kerouac told it during those magical weeks of spring 1951. In the end, the differences don’t matter all that much, though it’s nice to get an answer to the question so frequently asked of novelists, “How autobiographical is it?” In this case, the answer is: “Totally.”
Stan Persky (Books in Canada)
From Publishers Weekly
In introducing the fabled first draft of Kerouac's autobiographical novel-written on a single giant roll of paper, without breaks in the text, in an amphetamine-fueled marathon-editor Howard Cunnell refers to Allen Ginsberg's claim that "the published novel is not at all like the wild book Kerouac typed in '51." Characters are identified by their real names (rather than the 1957 version's apt pseudonyms) and their love affairs are more explicit, giving the book a juicy memoir-like feel, especially where Cassady and Ginsberg are concerned. The plot, however, is identical. Neal Cassady joins Kerouac and Ginsberg's bohemian circle in New York in the late 1940's, and inspires and cons them into traveling around the country, "searching for a lost inheritance, for fathers, for family, for home, even for America." The death of Kerouac's father plays a larger role in the story than in the 1957 version; and Justin W. Brierly, a teacher who served as mentor to Cassady and has a cameo in the published book, makes a series of recurring appearances in the scroll. The lack of paragraphs or chapters emphasizes the breathless intensity of Kerouac's prose. The anniversary publicity will introduce this classic to a new generation of readers, and while the scroll probably won't displace the novel's more familiar, polished incarnation, it will be of keen interest to beat aficionados and scholars.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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First Sentence
"I've telled all the road now," Jack Kerouac said in a May 22, 1951 letter he sent from New York west across the land to his friend Neal Cassady in San Francisco. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
"I've telled all the road now," Jack Kerouac said in a May 22, 1951 letter he sent from New York west across the land to his friend Neal Cassady in San Francisco. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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96 of 106 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Kerouac Redux, Uncensored, Aug 25 2007
By Lawrence D. Zeilinger - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: On the Road: The Original Scroll (Hardcover)
The 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" is commemorated by the release of three major volumes. They are a designated 50th Anniversary edition; "On The Road: The Original Scroll", the long-awaited controversial release of the uncensored 120-foot alleged "teletype roll" on which Kerouac blazingly blasted out his masterwork in just three weeks, six years before its publication; and a handsome Library of America edition, "Jack Kerouac: Road Novels 1957-1960", edited with textual notes by historian Douglas Brinkley, featuring Road and four other of his best known novels along with selections from his journals. (See separate review).
Whether this literary blitz will lead to a grand revival of interest in Kerouac's work by both old and new generations has yet to be seen. But it secures his reputation as a major American writer because his voice resonates with the great poignant prose of Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and John Steinbeck, celebrating the wonders and adventures of youthful travels on the open road. In the book's first major favorable review, Gilbert Millstein of The New York Times praised "On The Road" as being to the Beat Generation what Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" was to its precedent bohemian Lost Generation.
Millions of readers and generations of authors have been influenced by the "On The Road", typically discovered by readers in their adolescence. Almost everyone who has read the book remembers when and where they first encountered it, the way one indelibly recalls the loss of virginity.
Praise for Kerouac's work is far from universal. Many academics, critics and other writers dismiss him as a primitive and pretender, his writings merely ramblings of a drunken bum, and already are expressing displeasure at his being included as an author worthy of the high-brow Library of America collection. Truman Capote, an early inductee into the series, famously scoffed of Kerouac's prose, "It isn't writing. It's typing." But like his detractor, "On The Road" and Kerouac's other books have withstood the great test of time.
It has been known for decades Road was begun in 1948. Rough draft segments of Road are found in Kerouac's journals he kept since a youngster in his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, now collected and edited by Brinkley in the recent book "Windblown World".
Before the long-delayed publication of "On The Road" in 1957, what commonly is referred to as the full "first draft" was typed out at 100 words a minute during three weeks in April 1951 on a 120-foot length of paper often called a "teletype roll". It is one long, single-spaced, unbroken paragraph. Some say Kerouac wrote it on a Benzedrine binge; others point to a letter Kerouac wrote to Cassady saying it was just "coffee" that fueled his mind. While there is plenty of circumstantial evidence that speed really was the driving factor, in the end, this is just more pieces of minutiae and trivia permeating the Kerouac mythology, and really doesn't seem to matter.
In 2001, the original scroll was purchased at a Christies' auction in New York by Indianapolis Colts owner James Irsay for $2.43 million, a world record for a manuscript. After his successful bid, the following day Irsay allegedly was offered twice the price for it, and has said that he was prepared to pay as much as $10 million.
A good friend of Brinkley, Irsay dispatched his private jet to pick him up and accompany him to the auction as an "advisor". Irsay helped organize an extensive tour of the scroll, now encased in a long glass topped and sided table, with the scroll unfurled several feet and connected to two adjacent Torah-like cylinders which curators may occasionally carefully wind to reveal another segment of the text. It has been restored by adding backing and treating the front with a preservative. After a final tour date in 2009, Irsay plans to donate it to Lilly Library at the University of Indiana.
The "scroll" has hundreds of hand-written edits by Kerouac and many sections of lines deleted by cross-outs. John Sampas, Kerouac's literary executor, told MSNBC these would not be included in Viking's "uncensored" release. The original famous opening line of "On The Road" stating Kerouac first met Moriarty soon after Kerouac separated from his wife appears in Scroll recounting he first met Cassady after the death of Kerouac's father. The actual scroll ends abruptly, without the long, haunting Wolfeian paragraph closing the novel, pertaining to unsuccessful searches for Neal Cassady's father in Denver. The scroll was entrusted to his friend Lucien Carr for safekeeping, and Carr's dog chewed up the end. "Original Scroll" appendages a supposition of several pages in an effort to complete the manuscript and show its last words were close to the 1957 first edition. This was written by editor Howard Cunnell and is somewhat a leap of faith.
Sampas has claimed Viking's 1957 "censorship" was due to explicit references to sex and drugs. The "F" word was scratched out by Kerouac on the first page of the scroll text but interestingly does appear in The Original Scroll, although Sampas averred scratch-outs would not be included. The scroll was published despite potential libel problems involving characters' real names. Cassady and Ginsberg signed releases for their pseudonymous inclusion in Road. Neal Cassady's wife, Carolyn, who did not, lives in Great Britain, where libel verdicts are easier to obtain, and angrily denounced as a "travesty" plans to publish the scroll.
Four Kerouac scholars put Original Scroll together. Cunnell filled gaps and made calls on original deletions, corrected spelling, inserted paragraph breaks, and edited it for a more cohesive read. Cunnell, Joshua Kupetz, Penny Vlagopoulus and George Mouratidis wrote superbly insightful introductory background material and analysis, the book's first 97 pages.
An enduring question about the scroll concerns whether it actually was typed onto teletype paper. There are arguments for and against this. Carr, a news editor at New York's United Press International bureau, supplied Kerouac with teletype paper in the early 1950s. Some say the "scroll" was taped together in 12-foot segments.
Scroll examiners including Cunnell say portions of it have a scored line down one side, suggesting it may have been hand-ruled and cut to fit the platen of Kerouac's typewriter, indicating it was not teletype paper. However, Cunnell in Original Scroll also makes some errors, not the least of which is that the Burroughs house in Algiers was located next to a bayou. In fact it is about two blocks from the river and miles from the nearest bayou.
Brinkley in "Windblown World" acknowledges Carr gave Kerouac teletype paper, but refers to the scroll as "Japanese art tracing paper". In a 1979 New York Times article, Cassady biogarhper ("Holy Goof") William Plummer wrote that Kerouac "fed into his typewriter a bulky roll of Chinese art paper". The paper used also has been referred to variously as onion-skin, "nearly translucent", and as architectural drafting paper. Kerouac told fellow beat writer John Clellon Holmes that he planned to write the manuscript on "a roll of shelf paper."
In her bitter "Nobody's Wife", (2000), Kerouac's second wife Joan Haverty quotes him saying "'See what I found in that cabinet over there? This whole big roll of paper the same width as typing paper.'"
Gerald Nicosia's critical biography "Memory Babe" states Kerouac found "20-foot sheets of Japanese art paper" in the same apartment Kerouac shared with Haverty - whose previous tenant was her friend Bill Cannastra, beheaded in a subway accident. The apartment was in the same building as that of Carr. This may be Brinkley's "Japanese art paper" postulation source. Cunnell maintains the roll was taped together from eight pieces of very thin sheets owned by Cannastra.
After Kerouac presented the scroll to publisher Robert Giroux in 1951, unfurled it in his office and exclaimed "Here's my novel!" Giroux was shocked by the one long unbroken single-spaced paragraph and rejected it outright. Startled by the format and complaining printers would not be able to compose from it, Giroux said it "felt rubbery, like Thermo-fax paper."
The back dust jacket photo of "Scroll" shows Kerouac holding long, unfurled footage of a paper roll, connected to a large roll of paper, clearly not taped together. The book speculates that Kerouac used this particular roll for his second novel, The Dharma Bums.
The Road scroll now is yellowed with age the way foolscap or newsprint-type teletype paper degrades quickly due to acid content. While this continuing literary mystery deserves proper forensic examination, in the end, it too, really doesn't matter.
"On The Road: The Original Scroll" is well worth buying and reading, and ultimately, may appear to some (as initially it did to me) to be a better, more contextually significant book than "On The Road" as published that fateful day of September 5, 1957. The astute introductions alone are worth the price of admission and provide a rich history of the several drafts of the book ultimately published as Road. Reading the actual scroll text is a revelation worthy of the long wait and lends great insight into the factual material of the evolution of the subsequent drafts.
But after reading "Scroll", more than 35 years after I first encountered "Road", in re-reading the text of the common edition as we know it today, my feelings remain quite mixed. True died-in-the wool fans will undoubtedly at some point place both books next to each other so they can plainly see the differences. In some ways, the 1957 version is more easily readable, with its paragraph breaks, tighter more grammatical sentences, and the indisputable polish of a much-revised text more likely at that time to have garnered the public acclaim (and disdain) for its content. My penultimate feeling is the two books should not be compared for quality, and that each can stand on their own feet for what they are: Writings of a genius who is less significant for his description of "kicks" compared to the deep themes of the loss of his father and brother he sought to find in Neal Cassady, and, in later books, his pantheistic interwining of Catholic and Buddhist spirituality. The works of Jack Kerouac, like a grand old cypress tree refusing to break in a hurricane, have withstood ravages of the ages, and placed him amongst the immortals.
53 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A rare treat of a book, Aug 18 2007
By John Woods "TObject" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: On the Road: The Original Scroll (Hardcover)
Somehow I imagined the scroll to be an incomprehensible mess that editors had to sift through in order to create something that could be published as a novel. I was very far from the truth.
The Original Scroll is an example of excellent writing. Yes, it's missing paragraphs, but the style is sharp like a knife's edge. Kerouac's text has power to concentrate reader's imagination and then send it flying into a thousand of directions at once.
I think I actually prefer the scroll to the classic editions of On the Road. The scroll feels very real and easy to understand.
34 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A pilgrimage to the source of the great original road trip., Aug 19 2007
By Joshua G. Feldman "Technophile" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: On the Road: The Original Scroll (Hardcover)
On the Road - the original road trip. The book that took the Beat movement mainstream and fused literature and the youth culture inextricably in the 50s and 60s - presented here as the legendary scroll manuscript Kerouac initially produced. It's readable and electric. The act of reading this familiar and envigorating story anew makes it fresh again. The differences are small (in the scroll Kerouac uses real names instead of of the pseudonyms used in the published novel; the scroll is sexier and feels a bit edgier and more breathless) - but enough to make me experience it in a raw new way. Kerouac's quest for Cassady is a story that puts me in touch with what life's all about: freedom, friendship, creativity, partying, love - and the wanderlust questing nature of the human soul. It's never been more needed - or more pertinent.
This is a great way to reconnect with this great classic. If you've never read it, I wouldn't hesitate to read this over the published one. This version makes it easier to reconnect the novel's/memoir's action with history. Highly recommended
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