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On September 5, 1957, Viking published Jack Kerouac s novel On the Road. Few books have had as profound an impact on American culture. Pulsating with the rhythms of late-1940s/1950s underground America, jazz, sex, illicit drugs, and the mystery and promise of the open road, Kerouac s classic novel of freedom and longing defined what it meant to be "Beat" and has inspired generations of writers, musicians, artists, poets, and seekers who cite their discovery of the book as the event that "set them free". This edition commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the original publication of an American classic. Based on Kerouac s adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose four cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naïveté and wild abandon, and imbued with Kerouac s love of America, his compassionfor humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the...
The biggest immediate difference between the first draft and the finished product…is that while we know On the Road as a novel—the great novel of the Beat Generation—the scroll is essentially nonfiction, a memoir that uses real names and is far less self-consciously literary. It is a dazzling piece of writing for all of its rough edges, and, stripped of affectations that in the novel can sometimes verge on bathos, as well as of gratuitous punctuation supplied by editors more devoted to rules than to music, it seems much more immediate and even contemporary&#The scroll clarifies the book's connection to the past—to Mark Twain and tramp narratives and Woody Guthrie and cowboy sagas—and underlines the features it shares with its nearest contemporaneous cultural relative, Robert Frank's great photographic road book The Americans. The novel that On the Road became was inarguably the book that young people needed in 1957, but the sparse and unassuming scroll is the living version for our time.
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Adam A Testa
reviewed On the Road: The Original Scroll on May 30, 2017
On the Road: The Original Scroll
Jack Kerouac (1922 - 1969) is the author of this book. He is considered a pioneer of the Beat generation, along with Allan Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. If you are considering whether to read the book you must decide which edition to read. The book first came out in 1957 with the title On the Road. In 2007, the 50th anniversary edition of the book was published under the title: On the Road: the Original Scroll, which is what I have chosen to read and what I am reviewing.
This, the Scroll version, is a transcription of the original draft typed over twenty days from April 6 through April 26, 1951. It was typed as one long paragraph on sheets of tracing paper which Kerouac taped together to form a 120-foot (37 m) scroll. This "final draft" was not totally new, being based on earlier journal entries. The content is autobiographical and is based on real events and real people in the author's life. Kerouac writes of four road-trip adventures taken with his buddy Neal Cassady (1926 - 1968), three across the United States and one to Mexico City. The first trip was taken in 1947.
In the first edition pseudonyms were used, not so in the 50th anniversary edition, which is also said to be more sexually explicit. By today's standards though, the writing cannot be classified as graphic. The spontaneity of the text is said to be more evident in the Scroll.
Sex, alcohol, drugs, theft and other immoral behavior do make up a large part of the events described. Don't expect to fall in love with Kerouac or his friends. That is certainly not the point of the book!
What this book does draw well is the friendship between Jack and Neal and other friends too. It captures the feel of the Beat movement, which later became the Hippie movement we all know so well. I cannot say I admire Jack, Neal or their friends, but I do understand what they were searching for….even if much of the times things did get totally out of control! I am glad I read the book because it recalled for me some of the dreams I had as a youth, albeit in less dramatic form. Don't you remember that time in your younger days when you thought you would and could pursue freedom and individuality and would get every ounce of enjoyment out of life?! The belief that one could and would live life to the fullest. Then comes reality, not bad, but more down to earth.
Kerouac captures well the feel of a road trip across America at the end of the 40s. Of course not in fancy hotels, but instead hitchhiking and totally broke. That is to say really being on-the-road. What might you see? Who might you meet? How does the feel of the land change?
Some people say this book has religious undertones. I don't see that in the least.
There are portions that could definitely have been tightened. I am glad I read it, but now I am glad it is over.
The audiobook is narrated by John Ventimiglia. In his reading he wonderfully captures the spirit of the Beat movement. I have given the narration five stars. He captures well Kerouac's spontaneous prose and its intensity.
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