'He had little brakeman notebooks in which he would experiment with what he called sketches in words,' Inchausti explained. However, Kerouac drew much of the novel from his journals. 'He did compose it in three weeks on that scroll and was writing in spurts fueled by stimulants.' 'Well, the myth is half true,' Robert 'Larry' Inchausti, a Cal Poly professor emeritus of English, told New Times. The myth started when Kerouac answered talk show host Steve Allen's query of how long it took to write with a simple, 'Three weeks.' Over the years, Kerouac did little to dispel the idea of his spontaneously creative prowess.

But the idea that Kerouac, who lived briefly in San Luis Obispo in the spring of 1953, gave birth to On the Road in one gestaltic burst of creativity isn't quite true.

Kerouac could type 100 words a minute, and he frequently wrote onto rolls of paper so as not to impede his flow by having to change sheets. He meant to take issue with Kerouac's innovative 'bop spontaneous' writing style, not the purported speed at which he wrote the book or the medium upon which it was recorded. Capote, the celebrated author of In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany's, was half right, but not in the way he intended. 'That's not writing, it's typing,' Truman Capote devastatingly sneered as a putdown to On the Road.

THE SACRED SCROLL Jack Kerouac's 120-foot-long typed manuscript of On the Road will be on display in the SLO Library for two months, beginning on Sept.

Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. This version, capturing a moment in creative history, represents the first full expression of Kerouac’s revolutionary aesthetic.įor more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. A major literary event when it was published in Viking hardcover in 2007, this is the uncut version of an American classic-rougher, wilder, and more provocative than the official work that appeared, heavily edited, in 1957. IN THREE WEEKS in April of 1951, Jack Kerouac wrote his first full draft of On the Road-typed as a single-spaced paragraph on eight long sheets of tracing paper, which he later taped together to form a 120-foot scroll. The legendary 1951 scroll draft of On the Road, published as Kerouac originally composed it

On the road scroll