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or incorrectly, as a more authentic version of On the Road, the novel’s fictionality and Kerouac’s function as author become more apparent through comparative reading. Moreover, as the scroll manuscript destabilizes the presumed veracity of On the Road—a novel long read as a nonfictional hybrid, equal parts diary entry and autobiography—that instability of interpretation is transferred self-reflexively to the scroll manuscript itself. The scroll discredits its own veracity, establishing itself as a fictional prose narrative.

While Kerouac reorganizes social conventions in the text, giving prominence to cultures and practices marginalized elsewhere in the popular fiction of his day, he also restructures literary conventions and allusions in a way that has not yet been entirely co-opted by contemporary narrative. Thus, On the Road and especially the scroll manuscript continue to read like avant-garde texts a half century after their composition. The publication of the scroll manuscript opens new possibilities of interpretation for both texts. Those new possibilities foreground Kerouac’s narratological advances as they highlight the literary craft in On the Road, rendering finally On the Road as a novel, albeit a hybrid form that bridges the “typical ‘novel’ arrangement of experience” and the “‘fibrous’…world, with its hint of organic unity” of postmodernism, and the scroll manuscript as “the first or one of the first modern prose books in America.”

Fifty years after the publication of On the Road, readers of the scroll manuscript might experience a disruption of the dominant hierarchy and view the mythical Kerouac as subordinate to the writer Kerouac, who in early 1951 developed a new form of American prose narrative and wrote, “A lot of people say I don’t know what I’m doing, but of course, I do. Burroughs & Allen said I didn’t know what I was doing in the years of Town & City; now they know I did.” Now, so do we.

SUGGESTED FURTHER READING

Beaulieu, Victor-Lévy. Jack Kerouac: A Chicken Essay. Stella Fischman, Toronto: The Coach House Press, 1975.

Belgrad, Daniel. The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Burroughs, William S., “Remembering Jack Kerouac,” in The Adding Machine: Collected Essays. London: John Calder, 1985.

Cassady, Carolyn. Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg. London: Black Spring Press, 1990.

Cassady, Neal. Collected Letters, 1944-1967. Dave Moore, ed. New York: Penguin, 2004.

———.The First Third & Other Writings. San Francisco: City Lights, 1971; 1981.

———and Allen Ginsberg. As Ever: The Collected Correspondence of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. Barry Gifford, ed. Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts Book Co., 1977.

Charters, Ann. Kerouac: A Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973, 1987.

Clark, Tom. Jack Kerouac: A Biography. New York: Paragon House, 1990.

Coolidge, Clark, “Kerouac,” in Disembodied Poetics: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School, Anne Waldman and Andrew Schelling, eds.

———. Now It’s Jazz: Writings on Kerouac & the Sounds. Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1999.

Douglas, Ann, “Telepathic Shock and Meaning Excitement; Kerouac’s Poetics of Intimacy,” in The Beat Generation: Critical Essays, Kostas Myrsiades, ed.

Giamo, Ben. Kerouac, the Word and the Way: Prose Artist as Spiritual Quester. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000.

Gifford, Barry, and Lawrence Lee. Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1978, 1994.

Ginsberg, Allen, “The Great Rememberer,” “Kerouac’s Ethic,” in Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995. Bill Morgan, ed. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.

Gussow, Adam, “Bohemia Revisited: Malcolm Cowley, Jack Kerouac, and On the Road,” Georgia Review, Summer, 1984, vol. XXXVIII, no. 2.

Holmes, John Clellon. Go. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1952, 1988.

———, “The Great Rememberer,” “Perpetual Visitor,” “Gone in October,” in Representative