On The Road
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of On The Road, AbeBooks.com has just posted an interview with Tom Peters, who runs the Beat Book Shop in Boulder. It’s been many years since I read On The Road but there are clearly many people still fascinated by the book’s style and its non-stop narrative. Tom’s knowledge of the Beat Generation is second to none - he’s certainly keeping the Beatnik flame burning in his corner of Colorado.
Although first editions of On The Road are in demand, the most collectible Kerouac book is The Town and the City - his debut novel. Tom is asking $25,000 for a signed copy - that’s not that much considering that ‘the scroll’ (the single piece of paper that Kerouac used to type out On The Road) sold for $2.3 million.
You might also be interested to an excerpt from an interview with Jack Kerouac himself from a 1968 edition of The Paris Review. It sounds like a crazy, mad-cap interview straight out of On The Road itself. Perhaps Kerouac’s whole life was like that? It sounds like once On The Road became a massive hit that the author was bugged to death by would-be travellers looking for inspiration from the man turned his back on white-picket fence America.
