At last: the manuscript of On the Road, which Jack Kerouac typed 56 years ago on a 120-foot scroll of drafting paper, is reissued as he intended it.
by Joyce Johnson WEB EXCLUSIVE August 20, 2007 Jack Kerouac in 1955, four years after he wrote On the Road. Photograph by Tom Palumbo.
It is my strange fate to have been with Jack Kerouac shortly after midnight on September 5, 1957, at the very moment he finished reading the historic New York Times review of On the Road by Gilbert Millstein, which instantly established him as the "avatar" of the Beat Generation, predicting that On the Road would prove to be as important a book as Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. As we stood by the all-night newsstand on 66th Street and Broadway, Jack looked at me and said doubtfully, without excitement, "It's good, isn't it?" And I, a 21-year-old aspiring novelist at the time, actually had to assure this 35-year-old writer that it was great, the kind of review every writer dreams of getting.
I have always been puzzled by Jack's weirdly flat response. At the time, I thought he was probably just tired—he had turned up at my apartment only a few hours earlier after a two-day trip from Orlando, Florida (I'd had to lend him $30 for the fare). As the years went by, I wondered whether he'd had a premonition then that the kind of attention he was about to receive would be his undoing. But now, 50 years later, after a close reading of On the Road: The Original Scroll—finally transcribed, word for word, from the roll of paper upon which Jack composed it in 1951—I realize something else about why Jack was unable to enjoy his moment of triumph. Secretly, he may have felt almost ashamed to have won it with a book compromised by all the changes, large and small, he had been forced to make or accept—a book he had also come to regard as a warm-up for the much wilder ones that followed.
No one knew how exacting he was—a mad perfectionist with an aesthetic few would understand. As a lover and friend, Jack was unreliable, his feelings shifting as unpredictably as his moods, but as an artist he was pure of heart.
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