In the following years, he would traverse America several times in service of that project. The true story of On the Road, then, is this: In 1947, while still working on his first novel, The Town and the City, Kerouac decided to next write a novel about the American road. By the count of Berg Collection curator Isaac Gewitz (whose book Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was a great aid in researching this article), at least a half-dozen “proto-versions” of Kerouac’s famous novel exist, all written in the three years preceding the apparently spontaneous composition of the novel on a single scroll. I would go on to examine not only this one draft of On the Road, but several. To my astonishment, opening it brought me face to face with a handwritten draft of On the Road written the year before Kerouac wrote the famous scroll version. After a few minutes, a folder was placed in front of me. On one visit, I requested certain of Kerouac’s journals, then sat and waited in this, the quietest room in New York City. Once inside, I’d present my credentials and turn over my belongings, then let the librarian know which documents I wanted to view. That year I was granted access to the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, where some of the English language’s most important archives are housed, including Kerouac’s.Īt the end of a hushed hallway on the third floor of that imposing building on Fifth Avenue, I’d ring a bell and wait to be let in. Few events in literary history have captured the public imagination with such force.Īs a casual reader of Kerouac’s work, this was my understanding of On the Road, as well, when I began research on my book, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors, in 2013. Likely fueled by Benzedrine-although he claimed to have taken in nothing stronger than coffee-Kerouac wrote the novel as fast as he could think it, and in doing so defined a generation and helped solidify a nation’s love affair with the road trip.
If you are so much as a leisurely fan of American fiction, you likely already know the story of how On the Road came into the world-how, in April 1951, the novel spewed forth from Jack Kerouac in an almost magical reverie that lasted a full three weeks of days and nights in a Chelsea loft, as he wrote without pause on a 120-foot-long scroll.
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