How vital it is, for some of us, to encounter On the Road not as the edited novel the world came to know, but in its raw, unbroken form, in its legendary scroll, typewritten by Jack Kerouac on a continuous, 120-foot roll of tracing paper, sheets cut and taped together by hand to form a literal and figurative road. Composed in a fevered, three-week burst of creative energy in April 1951, the scroll stands as a pure artifact of Kerouac’s “spontaneous prose,” a manifesto of movement and momentum, uninterrupted by paragraph breaks, unfiltered by convention, and brimming with the restless urgency that defined a generation.
