It's literary legend, how Jack Kerouac wrote his breakthrough novel ``On the Road' in a three-week frenzy of creativity in spring 1951, typing the story without paragraphs or page breaks onto a 119-foot scroll of nearly translucent paper.
In fact, the Lowell native revised the book many times before it was published six years later, and while the scroll came to symbolize the spontaneity of the Beat Generation, the early, unedited version of the novel never reached the public.
Now, in time to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the novel's publication, the version of ``On the Road' that Kerouac wrote on the scroll will be published next year in book form for the first time, said John Sampas of Lowell, the executor of the writer's literary estate and the brother of his third wife, Stella. It will include some sections that had been cut from the novel because of references to sex or drugs.
The agreement between the Kerouac estate and the New York publisher Viking Penguin is an important development for literary scholars and Kerouac fanatics who have never had access to the original draft.
Via J-Walk
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