Jack Kerouac wrote the manuscript for the now classic Beat Generation novel On the Road within a 20-day period in New York City in 1951 employing “spontaneous prose,� a nonstop, unedited style inspired by letters from his friend Neal Cassady. Kerouac’s manuscript is a 120-foot long scroll consisting of a series of single-spaced typed twelve-foot long rolls of paper that have been taped together. Thirty-six feet of the original manuscript will be exhibited along with an overview of Kerouac’s life and other works, a brief history of the Beat movement and Beats in San Francisco, told through photos, books and ephemera.
This manuscript is on loan from the collection of James S. Irsay. © Estate of Anthony G. Sampatacacus and the Estate of Jan Kerouac. Sponsored by the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library.
Exhibition:
January 14 – March 19, 2006
Main Library, Lower Level, Jewett Gallery
100 Larkin Street (at Grove)
Related Programs:
Kerouac’s On the Road: From East to West
Gerald Nicosia, author of Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac, discusses the life of Jack Kerouac, his classic book On the Road and Kerouac’s connection to San Francisco.
Saturday, January 21, 2006
2 p.m. – 3 p.m.
Main Library, Lower Level, Koret Auditorium
100 Larkin Street (at Grove)
3 comments
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February 16, 2006 at 5:52 pm
allmusic
good!
May 22, 2006 at 4:01 am
bkerouac
You can read the transcript of Nicosia’s speech in my online magazine ANGEL HEAD at:-
http://bkerouac.tripod.com
January 20, 2007 at 7:01 am
Lawrence Zeilinger
John Sampas is a greedy opportunist whore aligned w/Irsay & Brinkley. Before he died, Jack told his nephew that he wanted to leave “nothing to the Greeks”. Nicosia’s battle for the rights of Jan Kerouac was a noble endeavor and “Memory Babe” stands clearly as the best of all the biographies. Neo-beatnik Brinkley, whose works are full of factual errors, grammer, puntution, syntactical and other errors, etc., has teamed up w/Sampas, Irsay, & the NY Libraary to make himself the “official biographer” of Kerouac, to be published, of course, by Vikng. In Brinkley’s “Majic Bus”, he without collaboration states Neal Cassady was born in Inependence, Misssori. He is a rabid opportunist with no shame. Carolyn Cassady has denounced plans to publish the further-edited “scroll” as a travesty. The whole situation is sickening — like a revisionist rewrite of the Holocaust. I am not dome with them yet, the shameless money-sucking bastards.