On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [20]
In his July 6 letter Ginsberg reported to Cowley that Kerouac had asked that Ginsberg try to “set his affairs in order.” Ginsberg wrote that Kerouac “is well and working on another version of On the Road. (I understand you were not aware that he intended to continue work on this book).”
Calling Kerouac “the most interesting writer who is not being published today,” Cowley replied on July 14 that the “only manuscript of his that I have read with a chance of immediate publication is the first version of On the Road. As much of the second version as I saw contained some impressively good writing but no story whatsoever.” Cowley’s reply suggests that what he had seen was the second draft of Road and sections of Visions of Cody, while Ginsberg’s comment that Kerouac was working on “another version” of On the Road raises the possibility that Kerouac had begun work on a third draft. By the fall the second draft was under consideration at Viking. In his in-house memorandum of October 20 editor Malcolm Cowley wrote:
On the Road is an account of some trips across the continent in the years 1947–9. It was written almost breathlessly by the author working day and night on a 100-foot-long roll of artist’s paper. I think he finished it in three weeks, handed it in to his (then) editor at Harcourt, Bob Giroux, and had it rejected. Later he did a good deal of rewriting on this conventionally typed draft, and this summer he went through the draft making many small cuts and some additions. We have it now, with the author’s permission to change it any way we please---though I think he is making a few additional changes of his own, especially cutting out the second return from San Francisco and moving one Denver chapter to the West Coast. These sound like good changes that will tighten the story.
I think it is the great source document of life among the beat or hip generation. Faults: the author is solemn about himself and about Dean. Some of his best episodes would get the book suppressed for obscenity. But I think there is a book here that should and must be published. The question is whether we can publish it and what we can or must do to make it publishable by our standards. I have some ideas, all for cutting.
Viking rejected the 297-page draft of Road in November 1953.
On Cowley’s recommendation, in the summer of 1954 Arabelle Porter, editor of New World Writing, accepted for publication Kerouac’s “Jazz of the Beat Generation,” a fusion of material taken from Road and Cody and credited with being selected from The Beat Generation, a novel completed in 1951. In his letter of thanks dated August 6, 1954, Kerouac told Cowley that On the Road was now retitled “Beat Generation.” This was the title Kerouac would prefer until the fall of 1955. The book had been at Little, Brown for a “long time,” he said, and had been rejected there. It was now under consideration at Dutton. In September, Sterling Lord, who had now become Kerouac’s agent, told Cowley that “On the Road, or The Beat Generation, as he now calls it, is still unsold.” On August 23 Kerouac told Ginsberg that he had called the novel “The Beat Generation,” “hoping to sell it…Littleshit Little Brown Seymour Lawrence” had turned the novel down.
Though it was his first publication in five years, Kerouac used the name Jean-Louis when “Jazz of the Beat Generation” was published in April 1955. Kerouac told Cowley