120 feet of words to be exact. Jack Kerouac captured the beating heart of a generation – one of wanderers, writers, and dreamers – with his iconic novel On the Road, written in one sweeping session of 20 days in the spring of 1951.

The single piece of paper (which is really tracing paper sheets taped together), ancient in its tea-like stain and torn edges, personal in its hand-written corrections, and inspiring in its fervent immediacy, is a testament to all that is, or was, “Beat” – a more free approach to self-expression, non-conformity, a bohemian lifestyle, among many other characteristics. The Beats wrote about sex, drugs, jazz – more than enough to shock our postwar nation’s elders and enough to invigorate their children. Kerouac compiled notes from journeys across America to create the closely autobiographical nature of On The Road, sometimes accompanied by anyone from Neal Cassady to Allen Ginsberg. Even though there was exceptional attention paid to Kerouac’s fortnight feat, the novel had been taking form long before the author’s almost overnight success, in between scribbling lines at Cassady’s and exploring each state he visited in great detail.

How did the scroll end up here? Aside the fact that it is on tour at museums and libraries across the country, Indianapolis Colt’s owner Jim Irsay bought the scroll in 2001 and Jim Canary of Indiana University has been its conservator since.

To me, the beauty of On the Road is its timeless appeal of the great American road trip we all want to take, with those fearless zealots that we call friends and the never-ending search for inspiration in a world that becomes all to familiar with daily life.

Who’s who in On The Road

Real-life person/Character name

Jack Kerouac / Sal Paradise
Gabrielle Kerouac / Sal’s Aunt
Alan Ansen / Rollo Greb
William S. Burroughs / Old Bull Lee
Joan Vollmer / Jane
Lucien Carr / Damion
Neal Cassady /Dean Moriarty
Carolyn Cassady / Camille
Hal Chase / Chad King
Henri Cru / Remi Boncoeur
Bea Franko / Terry
Allen Ginsberg / Carlo Marx
Diana Hansen / Inez
Joan Haverty / Laura
Luanne Henderson / Mary Lou
Al Hinkle / Ed Dunkel
Helen Hinkle / Galatea Dunkel
Jim Holmes / Tom Snark
John Clellon Holmes / Tom Saybrook
Herbert Huncke / Elmer Hassel
Frank Jeffries / Stan Shephard
Allen Temko / Roland Major
Bill Tomson / Roy Johnson
Ed Uhl / Ed Wall

On the Road Again with Jack Kerouac and Robert Frank is open at the IMA now through September 21.

I’ve had the pleasure to work on the team designing this exhibition and we’re all really excited for next week’s opening. How can you go wrong? Kerouac’s original scroll for On The Road, surrounded by Frank’s series The Americans.

Most of you probably read On The Road in either high school or college. I read it after reading an interview with Bob Dylan, who said that it changed his life. Its crazy, I’ve come across quite a few things in that way. Dylan says he likes it, I check it out. I first became aware of Frank in a modern art class that I took in college.

For those of you not familiar with either works, here’s the backstory:

In 1951, at a friend’s house, Kerouac sat down and started typing On The Road using sheets of teletype paper which he taped together to feed through his typewriter. 20 days and 6,000 words later he had the entire manuscript on eight, fifteeen-foot rolls of paper. The text is single-spaced, without paragraphs, and edited in pencil. Can you imagine creating one of the 20th-centuries most influential novels in 20 days of marathon typing? One word: Coffee. In the gallery you’ll be able to see the first 84 feet of the scroll until August 10th, at which time the other 35 feet will be unrolled.

In 1955, Robert Frank started out from New York to observe and photograph the United States. He traveled the country for two years taking 28,000 photos. What he came back with was black and white depictions of anything but the 1950s American utopia we’ve all come accustomed to seeing in pop culture. Ironically, Frank had trouble securing an American publisher so the book of photographs was originally published in France as Les Américains. In the gallery, you’ll see the 83 photographs Frank chose, arranged in the order of the book.

What I think is going to be a great feature of this exhibition is the educational space. Here you’ll get the chance to sample a real underwood typewriter, just like the one Kerouac used. You’ll see a first edition of On The Road and get to have a seat and view some great documentary footage and interviews, including Kerouac on a 1959 Steve Allen Show, reading from On The Road.

The exhibition opens next Thursday, June 26th. Be here for the opening celebration at 7pm for a concert with David Amram who was a lifelong collaborator of Kerouac’s. The two collaborated on jazz and poetry readings in New York’s Greenwich Village and on many other projects including the film Pull My Daisy from 1959. (written and narrated by Kerouac and directed by Frank). The museum is having a Robert Frank film marathon Sunday, August 17 which includes Pull My Daisy. Grab a new Art For You for more info. It should be a fun time. And it’s all free! So really, what’s stopping you? Come by and let me know what you think.

So, it’s not to hard to believe that I’m pretty interested and excited to have the original typescript of Kerouac’s On The Road coming to the IMA for an exhibition… (see On the Road Again with Jack Kerouac and Robert Frank )

I’m also kind of an info-dork.  I love graphs and charts or all sorts.  Anyone else who is equally geeked up on crazy ways to view information should really check out the Information Aesthetics Blog. It’s a really great set of creative and artistic ways of representing information. But, I digress…

One day, perusing this blog, I happened to stumble upon the work of Stefanie Posavec. She must be a genius because her work is so beautiful and insightful! What really caught my eye was some work she has done in visualizing the textual structure of none other than Kerouac’s On The Road!

Spreading out link leaves of a Ginkgo tree, this beautiful example of infovis at its finest shows all sorts of interesting details about Kerouac’s novel.  Each branch of the tree represents chapters, paragraphs, even the sentences and words used in the novel. 

Each is colored by what topic it relates to like light blue for “Travel” and green for “Bop and Jazz Music”.  By doing this it’s really easy to see for example that Kerouac talks about “Work and Survival” almost solely in chapters 11 and 13.  I love the simplicity and insight that she achieves here, and with such a beautiful aesthetic!  If all graphs and charts were this engaging we would have paid more attention in school!

The article on the NotCot Blog has a number of examples of her work with On The Road that cover the arrangement of topics as above, as well as visualizations of sentence length and even Kerouac’s use of punctuation and italics!  Definitely worth a look see!