On the road

I've just been able to post this now, even though it was in the news a few days ago. Jack Kerouac's original "On the Road," before it was f'ed with by the publishers, is being released next year. I read that book when I was about to start my senior year in high school...I bought it for 50 cents at a flea market. Best 50 cents I ever spent. Opened up a whole new world for me, I think, just like "Tom Sawyer" did when I first read it in 5th grade. It took me a while to get into that because of the diction Twain used, but once I got over that, the book had me, and I devoured pretty much everything else he wrote.
Anyway, back to Kerouac:


'On the Road' to Be Published Again
(AP) LOWELL, Mass.

Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" will be published in its unedited original scroll version by Viking Press, which published the Beat Generation classic in September 1957.

John Sampas, executor of the writer's literary estate and brother of Stella Sampas, Kerouac's third wife, said he has signed a contract with Viking, an imprint of Pearson plc's Penguin Group USA. He hopes the work will be out by the end of next year, the 50th anniversary of the publication.

"Incidents in the original were edited out of the published version because of the censorship of the time," said Sampas, who noted that some of the edited sections refer to drugs and sex. "On the scroll, entire paragraphs are crossed out and not included in the published version."

Sampras said the new version will be in book form, but taken from the original scroll. Any sections Kerouac had crossed out before turning it into the publisher will be excluded in the new edition.

In 1951, Kerouac, hopped up on coffee and Benzedrine, sat at a typewriter and began retelling the tale of an aimless trek he made across America. In a spontaneous, stream-of-consciousness burst, he typed on long sheets of tracing paper, taping each finished page to the previous one to form one continuous, rolling text.

Published six years later, "On the Road" won critical praise and became an icon of the post-World War II subculture of intellectuals, writers, musicians and rebels who identified with the freedom of Kerouac's cross-country odyssey and embraced his disdain for 1950s conformity.

The original, 120-foot, coffee-stained scroll that is yellowing with age was purchased in 2001 by James Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, for $2.43 million. The scroll is touring U.S. museums and libraries.