On the Road

2010

Special Collections PS3521 E735 O5 2010

London: Folio Society

The first draft of what was to become Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was written on a scroll, some 120 feet of tracing paper that the author cut and taped together. Written over a three week period in 1951, it was tapped out single-spaced, with no margins or paragraph breaks. It was eventually published by Viking Press in 1957. Depicting the exploits of Salvatore Paradise (Kerouac) and Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady), the book is now regarded as the high-point representative of the ‘Beat Generation’; a must-read for those interested in post-war America. This evocative photograph in this Folio Society edition is of Times Square, New York.