September 5, 2017 marks 60 years since the original publication of On the Road, Jack Kerouac's road trip roman à clef and one of the Beat Generation's three best known works--alongside Allen Ginsberg's Howl and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch. On the Road brings Kerouac's kinetic prose to a series of trips with Neal Cassady, called Dean Moriarty, through late-1940s America. Kerouac, as Sal Paradise, and Moriarty meet other Beat figures and many women on several drug and jazz-fueled jaunts across the United States and Mexico. Fast-living Dean is the catalyst to Sal's travels, separated in five parts, on an aimless but energetic search for a greater meaning to life, though tinged with a certain sadness at never being able to find it.
In April 1951, Kerouac wrote the first draft of On the Road over three weeks. He typed it as a single paragraph with no margins, covering eight, single-spaced pages of tracing paper. He later taped these pages together into a 120-foot-long scroll. This original version was heavily edited prior to its 1957 publication, including the substitution of pseudonyms for major characters and cutting sexual passages considered pornographic by 1950s standards. In 2007, Penguin Classics released On the Road: The Original Scroll, a 50th-anniversary edition of Kerouac's novel as originally written. The actual scroll is occasionally brought out for public display by its current owner, Indianapolis Colts CEO Jim Irsay. It's currently part of a special exhibition at the American Writers Museum in Chicago through October 6. --Tobias Mutter
