75 Years Ago: Kerouac Finishes On the Road
Today in 1951, Jack Kerouac finished the first draft of the defining work of the Beat Generation
You know about the scroll, right?
On this day, 75 years ago, Jack Kerouac finished writing On The Road. Nudged on by the power of amphetamines, he knocked out the whole thing in just three weeks. He typed the entire manuscript on a makeshift scroll, made by taping together a ream of tracing paper into a single 120-foot sheet. Single-spaced, no margins, no paragraph breaks. Now that’s a bender.
It begs an obvious question: Why exactly? Kerouac said it was so that he would never have to stop typing. But seriously, how long does it take to change the paper on a typerwriter?
The Beats had a knack for this: Writing hacks that were also myth-making machines. William Burroughs did it with cut-up technique, and Allen Ginsberg did it by incorporating breath and chant into his poetry. Brion Gysin made a freaking dreammachine! These were true gadget guys.
The scroll had a way of turning Kerouac himself into a character. He called his writing process “spontaneous prose.” Truman Capote heard that and dropped the famous zinger: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” (This really ticked off Burroughs.)
Anyway, did you see that the original scroll actually went up for sale at Christie’s last month?
Country singer Zach Bryan ended up buying it for $12 million. Which is enough to earn it a place on the wikipedia page for most expensive books. The scroll will make a fine addition to the Jack Kerouac Center, a museum he is creating in Lowell, Massachusetts.
Kerouacheads like to debate whether On the Road should be read in scroll vs non-scroll form. But if you think about it, even the scroll version is a compromise — a paperback book, with page breaks. A purist would only read On the Road on an actual scroll. Someone should publish one. Quick, get Taschen on the line.
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150 Years Ago Today: In the first National League baseball game, the Boston Red Caps beat the Philadelphia Athletics, 6-5.