Jack sits down in front of his typewriter, lights a cigarette, and turns the knob on the transistor, from which escape the first notes of a raging "Bird”.

He adjusts the hundreds of sheets of tracing paper, which he has been cutting for months to the size of his typewriter and bond together to form a 120-foot-long roll.

Like a fisherman weaving his net before a night of fishing, Jack meticulously prepares the miles of paper, rolling asphalt on which, for almost 20 days, almost non-stop, he would write what would become "On the Road".

APRIL 1951, NEW YORK, USA

Right up to the last moment, he wonders whether he should write it in his mother tongue or in the English he learned in Lowell, he the child of Kanucks, he the Breton from America.

The sound of speed, the fury of existences transcribed in the incessant clicking of the typewriter keys, blending the raw beauty of the landscapes of a continent impossible-to-believe with the shattered lives of a People whose grandeur sometimes overwhelms. Stories are born and characters emerge from days not yet gone, interrupted only by coffee, benzedrine and endless cigarettes, leaving no room for chapters nor paragraphs, before finally dying on these words:

“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old brokendown river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the evening-star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks in the west and folds the last and final shore in, and nobody, just nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Neal Cassady, I even think of Old Neal Cassady the father we never found, I think of Neal Cassady, I think of Neal Cassady.”

Extract of “On The Road, The Original Scroll” Edited by Howard Gunnel and first published by Penguin Books in 2008

Copyrights : John Sampas, Literary Representative, the Estate of Stella Sampas Kerouac

WRITTEN BY : P-V KERMEL

PHOTO N°1 : JACK KEROUAC IN NYC IN 1953
BY ALLEN GINSBERG

PHOTO N°2 : JACK KEROUAC READING ONE OF HIS SHORT STORIES IN NEW YORK CITY, 1958
BY PHILIPP HARRINGTON

ROLLING ASPHALT