Jack Kerouac: On the Road Again

In the spring of 1951 in New York City, Jack Kerouac sat down to type his magnum opus, On the Road, onto 10 rolls of architectural tracing paper taped together to create the most famous scroll in secular literary history. Now the scroll travels back to New York for the 50th anniversary of On the Road‘s first printing.

From Nov. 9, 2007, through March 16, 2008, 60 ft. (18.3 m) of it will be on show, along with other Beatific ephemera, at the New York Public Library’s main branch on 42nd Street and 5th Avenue. The exhibition includes some of Kerouac’s earliest journals, plus family photographs, letters and manuscripts scrawled out and doodled upon.

Just don’t look here for evidence of the finger-snapping hipsters that the loaded term Beat conjures. Kerouac never identified with the counter-culture that adopted his masterpiece as a generational guidebook to social dissent. For him, the Beatific was a solitary state of mind, and he satisfied his own spirituality not with hipness, but with a scholarly ardor. Kerouac was complicated: shy but frenetically communicative, he admired Buddha and St. Francis of Assisi yet supported the Vietnam War. “So often Kerouac is seen as a wild man and genius who didn’t know what he was doing,” says the NYPL’s Isaac Gewirtz, who curated the show and wrote an accompanying book, Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road. “But he was a first-rate writer, and my hope is that a new generation will be taken by the rigor of his mind.” It’s all there in the scroll.