Scrolling Through

No American novel of consequence has had a more tortuous or mythologized path to publication than On the Road. Jack Kerouac supposedly composed it in a days-long bout of frenzied typing, feeding a continuous scroll of paper into his typewriter to avoid breaking the flow of inspiration. Yet as Kerouac scholar Isaac Gewirtz has written, this is accurate but not true. The myth of the novel’s composition neglects the larger context of its long gestation and even longer struggle to reach print.