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When Jack Kerouac originally wrote “On The Road”, he typed it onto a single scroll of paper in a 3-week stream of words spilling to paper in a way he some saw as the literary version of free jazz.  Due to the style and much of the subject matter, the book was not published until names were removed, events were changed and certain “sympathies” were deleted.  The finished product is considered by many to be a masterpiece.

If I had read it when I was a teenager, I am sure I would have agreed.  By the time I did start reading it, I was 23 and couldn’t really care about the book.  The fact that it was a fictionalized account meant, to me, that there was no way for me to know what was real, what was clever fiction, what was lame because it was true and what was lame because the publisher demanded the truth be tempered for the masses.  More important than that was the fact that I could easily call up any of a dozen friends who could tell me road stories that a) were true b) were better than the events detailed in “On The Road” and c) happened to my friends, not some fictionalized version of a stranger.

Now that the full, unedited stream-to-scroll version of “On The Road” is to be published, I will most likely read it and enjoy it more, knowing that this is what came from his head, dropped straight onto the unending page.  Much like the blogs I
read.