Also contrary to received ideas, Kerouac by his own admission fueled his work with nothing stronger than coffee. Irsay, a guitarist with a liking for electric Bob Dylan, helped produce 'Colors,' a tribute to Ryan White, a boy with AIDS whose legal struggle to attend a school in Indiana became a national cause in 1985 White died in 1990 at the age of 18.Contrary to legend, the scroll was not a roll of teletype paper but a series of large sheets of tracing paper that Kerouac cut to fit and taped together, and it is not unpunctuated - merely unparagraphed, which makes a certain physical demand on the reader, who is deprived of the usual rest stops. 'It certainly wasn't something where I'm going to buy this because someday it will go up in value or I'm going to buy this because I want to sit and look at it,' Irsay said. Some museums are paying only a minor fee to display the scroll, mostly to cover the cost of shipping. Still, buying the scroll and sending it on tour has little to do with profit, he said. Irsay and Kerouac share connections - Kerouac was a star football player in Lowell, Mass., during high school and played briefly at Columbia University in New York. 'But the stream of consciousness, jump-cut, rapid motion of the book will not be as strange as it was to readers a generation ago.' 'There's a long, long tradition of displaying literary artifacts that are treasured,' said Taylor, who collaborated with beat poet Allen Ginsberg on numerous projects. It's a storied life for a rough draft of a classic, said Steven Taylor, chair of writing and poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo. The scroll passed hands and wound up in the New York Public Library. When Kerouac died, his estate was reportedly valued at less than $100. 'That it kind of just spewed out of him is what it's all about.' 'It's the way that it was written that, in many ways, is more important than what it really is,' said Howard Collinson, director of the University of Iowa Museum of Art, which will show the entire scroll in 2005. That's typing,' author Truman Capote said in a review of Kerouac's book.

When finally published six years later, it won critical acclaim as an unconventional masterpiece, defining a post-World War II generation of intellectual outlaws on an aimless odyssey across the American landscape.īut while some - including The New York Times - praised its publication, others dismissed it. Kerouac wrote the novel in a coffee-saturated, 21-day typewriter marathon at a friend's apartment in New York City in 1951.

On the road scroll