50 YEARS AFTER HIS MASTERPIECE PUBLISHED KEROUAC STILL POPULAR

It has been 50 years since Jack Kerouac and his On the Road hit bookshelves, raised controversy and was heard in a new voice to a whole generation of readers looking for new excitement in the second half of the century. The reference to “The Beat Generation” comes from his chance remark about many of the other writers of the day and how they were so lucky to get publishers.

Today his beat travelogue continues to sell 100,000 copies a year in the U.S. and Canada alone. Legend has it that Kerouac wrote On the Road in three weeks, typing it almost nonstop on a 120-foot roll of paper. The truth is that the book actually had a much longer, bumpier journey from inspiration to publication, complete with multiple rewrites and repeated rejections. Kerouac typed about 100 words a minute, and replacing regular sheets of paper in his typewriter just interrupted his flow — thus the scroll. He was really a supreme craftsman, and devoted to writing and the writing process--first in his head, then in his journals between 1947 and 1949, and then again on his typewriter. Between 1951 and 1957, Kerouac tinkered with as many as six drafts in a desperate attempt to get editors to accept his work,

And so it went, until the mid-'50s, when a new crop of young, receptive editors — and enthusiastic response to On the Road excerpts printed in The Paris Review — helped persuade Viking to publish it. They offered him a $900 advance; His agent talked them up to $1,000, but the publisher, fearing the author would squander the money, insisted on paying it out in $100 installments.