On the Road: Jack Kerouac's manuscript scroll

Thu 4 Oct – Fri 28 Dec 2012


On the Road is one of the defining books of the Beat Generation.



Written over a period of three weeks in April 1951 in manic bursts of what Allen Ginsberg referred to as ‘spontaneous bop prosody’, Jack Kerouac typed the manuscript on rolls of tracing paper, which he taped together into a long scroll to avoid replacing paper at the end of the page and interrupting his creative flow.
We are delighted to welcome the 120-foot long scroll to London for the first time. It will be on display in a specially-constructed case, alongside sound and printed materials from the Library’s collection.

Image courtesy of Carolyn Cassady

Free / Folio Society Gallery
With support from the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library

Image courtesy of Christie's New York

On the Road events

• Experience an unmissable performance by the world-renowned poet Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones More
• Attend a special film preview of On the Road, Walter Salles’s long-awaited adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s novel More
• Join Beat scholar Howerd Cunnel as he explores what happened during the rest of what Kerouac would later call ‘the great year of my enlightenment’ More