BCAA Travel Blog

From time to time, travel publications such as National Geographic Traveller and Outside magazine publish lists of the greatest travel books of all time. Typically, these rankings include the exotic dispatches of Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin, Pico Iyer, Jonathan Raban and Wilfred Thesiger. Conspicuously absent from most of these lists is the travel book that I consider the most influential of all time–Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. It was certainly influential for me. I devoured the novel at age 16, and was immediately seized with a feverish impulse to hitchhike across Canada, an ambition that was rudely thwarted my parents. I was hypnotized by the book’s rhythmic language, descriptive beauty, chaotic exuberance and raw energy. As Kerouac wrote: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”

I’m not the only person to be swept away by the book. To date, On the Road has sold more than 3.5 million copies and has been translated into 25 languages. Nearly 51 years after its publication, it is still selling more than 100,000 copies a year, and shows no signs of slowing down. As Tony Long wrote recently in Wired magazine: “Fifty years along, On the Road still resonates for those of us possessed of a restless spirit, who see gray conformity as spiritual death, who place the value of the individual above the mere possession of things.”

The romantic appeal of On the Road was also fuelled by the myth of its creation. According to the legend, Kerouac pounded out the manuscript in a 20-day binge of benzedrine, nicotine, caffeine and jazz in April 1951, typing the novel in “spontaneous prose” without paragraphs or page breaks onto a 36-metre long scroll of paper. When Kerouac submitted the opus to his editor, Robert Giroux of Harcourt-Brace, he reportedly announced, ”There’ll be no editing on this manuscript. This manuscript has been dictated by the holy ghost.”

In truth, Kerouac heavily reworked On the Road; first in his head, then in his journals between 1947 and 1949, then again on his Underwood typewriter. Between 1951 and 1957, he tinkered with as many as six drafts in a desperate attempt to convince editors to publish his book. But the part about the scroll is true. Kerouac, who typed about 100 words a minute, taped sheets of tracing paper in twelve-foot sections so they would run through his manual typewriter without having to change individual sheets, enabling him to keep his flow of writing uninterrupted. “Went fast because the road is fast,” Kerouac wrote in a letter to his friend Neal Cassady, describing the marathon session that produced On the Road. “Rolled it out on the floor and it looks like a road.”

The novel, however, was repeatedly rejected by various publishing houses until a new crop of young, receptive editors—and enthusiastic response to On the Road excerpts printed in The Paris Review—helped persuade Viking to publish it, but only after Kerouac agreed to substantial revisions, deleted sections (including some sexual depictions deemed pornographic), added smaller literary passages, and agreed to obtain signed release forms from its main characters. Eventually, Kerouac assigned everyone aliases: Neal Cassady became Dean Moriarty, the poet Allen Ginsberg appeared as Carlo Marx, and Kerouac christened himself Sal Paradise.

Even so, there was no pot waiting at the end of the rainbow. Viking offered a paltry $900 advance; Kerouac’s agent, Sterling Lord, talked the publisher up to $1,000, but Viking, fearing the author would squander the money, insisted on doling it out in $100 instalments.

Just as Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises spoke to a so-called Lost Generation, Kerouac’s book spoke to a young Beat Generation which rose up poor and bewildered and “beat” after the Great Depression and World War II–an opinion that first appeared in a glowing New York Times book review by Gilbert Millstein in 1957, which (literally overnight) made Kerouac famous. Before the Times review, Kerouac was borrowing bus money from his girlfriend, Joyce Johnson. Afterwards, he was embarrassed to be mobbed at parties. Women wanted him to make love to him and men wanted to fight him, no doubt confusing him with the novel’s central protagonist, Dean Moriarity, whom Kerouac described as “trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent—a sideburned hero of the snowy West.”

However, it wasn’t the vicissitudes of fame that eventually killed Kerouac, but a weakness for alcohol. When he died in 1969 at age 47 from an alcohol-abetted hemorrhage, induced by a bar brawl in St. Petersburg, Florida, he left behind a catalogue of 24 novels and books of poetry, and an estate valued at $91.00. The scroll of On the Road passed on to Kerouac’s third and last wife, Stella Sampas, and remained forgotten in storage for many years, as Kerouac’s estate gradually grew in value and became the subject of assorted legal wrangles. Then, in 1999, Tony Sampas, a nephew of Stella, inherited the scroll and decided to sell it.

On May 22, 2001, the yellowed and frayed scroll was bought at a Christie’s auction for $2.4 million, the highest amount ever paid for a literary manuscript. The buyer was Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts football team. Fortunately, Irsay didn’t choose to keep the relic locked away. Recognizing its historic importance, he offered to exhibit the scroll across the United States in a 13-stop, five-year national tour of museums and libraries. “My goal all along was to have it and share it with all those who want to see it, whether it’s in this country or other countries,” Irsay told the Associated Press.

The official tour of the Kerouac Scroll began in Orlando in January of 2004 and is scheduled to continue to the end of 2009. So far, the exhibit has been drawing huge crowds on its journey across America. And last year, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the novel’s publication, the original scroll version of On the Road was published by Viking in book form for the first time, minus chapters or paragraphs. As well as containing material that was deleted from the original draft due to its explicit nature, the scroll version also uses the real names of the characters.

However, one mystery remains–exactly how Kerouac concluded the story that he bashed out in that three-week frenzy in 1951. The last part of the original scroll of On the Road is missing. All that remains is a ragged edge. In explanation, Kerouac scribbled a note in pencil in the margin, “Ate by Patchkee, a dog.”

Was he joking? We’ll never know. But in retrospect, those missing words and the notion that the book has no ending, like the open road, is a perfect epitaph.

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