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Origins

A popular legend that On the Road was written in three weeks while Kerouac lived with Joan Haverty, his second wife, at 454 West 20th Street in Manhattan, New York, is apocryphal. It took nine years for the final copy to be published. Kerouac typed the manuscript on what he called "the scroll":^[3] a continuous, one hundred and twenty-foot scroll of tracing paper sheets that he cut to size and taped together. The roll was typed single-spaced, without margins or paragraph breaks. Contrary to rumor, Kerouac said he used no stimulants during the brief but productive writing session, other than coffee.^[4] Plans to publish the original scroll were announced in 2006;^[5] Viking Press published On the Road: The Original Scroll in 2007.^[4]

Recently, it was discovered that Kerouac first started writing On The Road in French, a language in which he also wrote two unpublished novels.^[6] These writings are in dialectal Quebec French, and predate by a decade the first novels of Michel Tremblay.

"The scroll" still exists — it was bought in 2001, by Jim Irsay (Indianapolis Colts football team owner), for $2.4 million, and is available for public viewing. The scroll was displayed in sections at Indiana University's Lilly Library in mid-2003, and in January 2004, the roll started a thirteen-stop, four-year national tour of museums and libraries, starting at the Orange County History Center in Orlando, Florida. From January through March 2006, it was at the San Francisco Public Library with the first 30 feet (9 m) unrolled. It spent three months at the New York Public Library in 2007, and in the spring of 2008 visited the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The scroll traveled next to Columbia College Chicago in the autumn of 2008, then was displayed at the Birmingham University in England, before being moved once more to University College, Dublin,Ireland and then to NUI Maynooth before returning to the US in March 2009.

The legend of how Kerouac wrote On The Road excludes the tedious organization and preparation preceding the creative explosion. Kerouac carried small notebooks, in which much of the text was written as the eventful seven-year span of road trips unfurled. He furthermore revised the scroll's text several times before Malcolm Cowley, of Viking Press, agreed to publish it. Besides the differences in formatting, the original scroll manuscript contained real names and was longer than the published novel. Kerouac deleted sections (including some sexual depictions deemed pornographic in 1957) and added smaller literary passages.^[7] Viking Press released a slightly edited version of the original manuscript on 16 August 2007 titled On the Road: The Original Scroll corresponding with the 50th anniversary of original publication. This version has been transcribed and edited by English academic and novelist, Dr Howard Cunnell. As well as containing material that was excised from the original draft due to its explicit nature, the scroll version also uses the real names of the protagonists, so Dean Moriarty becomes Neal Cassady and Carlo Marx becomes Allen Ginsberg etc.^[8]

As of 2006^[update], the book is slated for cinematic adaptation as On the Road to be directed by Walter Salles.