Kerouac's Style

Click on the image above to read the opening lines of On the Road as originally written in Kerouac's first full draft — a massive, uncut scroll, 120 feet long, which he claimed was written over the course of three benezedrine and coffee-fuelled weeks. Here's another photo of Kerouac with the scroll, which was purchased by Jim Irsay (owner of the Indianapolis Colts) in the 1990s and has been going on the road itself in a number of exhibitions since then.

Kerouac's prose style, which he termed "spontaneous bop prosody" was inspired by the tremendous verve of bebop jazz, the westward momentum of a speeding automobile.  Two brief key texts, in which he spells out the methods and ideologies behind his writing are "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" [link] and "Belief and Technique for Modern Prose" [link].