On the road : the original scroll /
Jack Kerouac ; edited by Howard Cunnell ; introduction by Howard Cunnell, Joshua Kupetz, George Mouratidis, and Penny Vlagopoulos.
- Penguin Classics deluxe ed.
- New York : Penguin Group, 2008.
- 408 p. ; 22 cm.
Though Jack Kerouac began thinking about the novel that was to become On the Road as early as 1947, it was not until three weeks in April 1951, in an apartment on West Twentieth Street in Manhattan, that he wrote the first full draft that was satisfactory to him. Typed out as one long, single-spaced paragraph on eight long sheets of tracing paper that he later taped together to form a 120-foot scroll, this document is among the most significant, celebrated, and provocative artifacts in contemporary American literary history. It represents the first full expression of Kerouac's revolutionary aesthetic, the identifiable point at which his thematic vision and narrative voice came together in a sustained burst of creative energy. It was also part of a wider vital experimentation in the American literary, musical, and visual arts in the post-World War II period.