On the Road: the Original Scroll

'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

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922. In 1947, enthused by bebop, the rebel attitude of his friend Neal Cassady, and the throng of hobos, drug addicts and hustlers he encountered in New York, he decided to discover America and hitchhike across the country. His writing was openly autobiographical and he developed a style he referred to as 'spontaneous prose' which he used to record the experiences of the Beat Generation. Among his many novels are On the Road, Visions of Cody, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums and Big Sur. He died in 1969.