On the Road: The Original Scroll - (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by Jack Kerouac (Paperback)

About the Book

The legendary 1951 scroll draft of "On the Road" is now published as Kerouac originally composed it: rougher, wilder, and more provocative than the official work that was released, heavily edited, in 1957.

Book Synopsis

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 1957. On the Road: The Original Scroll is Kerouac's signature achievement--and one of the most significant, celebrated, and provocative documents in American literary history.

Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Review Quotes

? A dazzling piece of writing for all of its rough edges, stripped of affectations that in the novel can sometimes verge on bathos . . . It seems much more immediate and contemporary.?
?Luc Sante, " New York Times Book Review"



A dazzling piece of writing for all of its rough edges, stripped of affectations that in the novel can sometimes verge on bathos . . . It seems much more immediate and contemporary.
Luc Sante, " New York Times Book Review"

a A dazzling piece of writing for all of its rough edges, stripped of affectations that in the novel can sometimes verge on bathos . . . It seems much more immediate and contemporary.a
aLuc Sante," New York Times Book Review"

About the Author

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 autobiographical fiction to be part of "one vast book," The Duluoz Legend. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.