Marion made a pilgrimage to New York to see this mythical, 120-foot-long scroll. Also on view were his notebooks, paintings, notes and novel outlines.

PHOTO: Allen Ginsberg, photographer. “Jack Kerouac Avenue A across from Thompkins [sic] Park 1953, New York, his handsome face looking into barroom door—This is best profile of his intelligence as I saw it. Sacred, time of Subterraneans writing.” Gelatin silver print, October(?) 1953. New York Public Library, the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection. Reproduced courtesy of the Allen Ginsberg Estate.

IMAGES from the exhibit with commentary below. More added daily. Visit Fiction Daily to read more. 

You can also find these entries on the Word Press "fd archive" blog which republishes all entries. It's found here.

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) rarely stayed in one place for very long, but he lived for some months just outside Rocky Mount, N.C., my hometown, in an area that's today known as West Mount. In the 1950s, it was called Big Easonburg Woods. He lived with his sister, Caroline or "Nin" and her husband, Paul, and their son, Paul Jr. Kerouac often wrote and slept on the screened-in back porch, as many of us from eastern North Carolina have done even in winter.

ABOVE: Jack Kerouac. “NIGHT NOTES & Diagrams for ON THE ROAD.” Manuscript notes for the novel, November 1949. New York Public Library, Berg Collection, Jack Kerouac Archive. Reproduced courtesy of John G. Sampas, legal representative of the estates of Jack and Stella Kerouac.

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Jack Kerouac. Design for front cover of proposed paperback edition of On the Road, 1952. NYPL, Berg Collection, Jack Kerouac Archive. Reproduced courtesy of John G. Sampas, legal representative of the estates of Jack and Stella Kerouac. Larger view here

  Signal lantern used by Jack Kerouac, who worked as a railroad brakeman, a very physically demanding occupation.

Face of Buddha by Jack Kerouac, 1956, the only work of this style, created in Rocky Mount, N.C., during his Buddhist studies.

"Some of the Dharma" is less known than Kerouac's other works, but its poems, thoughts and designs capture Buddhist ideas. Written largely in Rocky Mount, N.C.

  A manuscript for "Gone on the Road," later rewritten as the mythical scroll "On the Road."

Before "On the Road" there was "The Town and the City." An American passed here.

Anyone who thinks Jack Kerouac was a spontaneous genius never saw his endless notes before beginning On the Road, including this outline.

Racing sheet, "Turf Authority," created by 14-year-old Kerouac. Read more here

   He was a football hero in high school, earning a scholarship to Columbia University

The Kerouac family in a bar, a image foreshadowing Jack Kerouac's alcoholism.

As part of his own journey as a writer, Kerouac dispensed with traditional narrative process and in a single burst of literary activity wrote the novel in about three weeks in 1951. He typed it onto 120-feet of taped paper sheets; together his manuscript forms a a scroll that reflects the seeming infinity of blacktop leading west. Legend has mistakenly registered it as an episode of first-draft brilliance, but Kerouac had been working on drafts for years. Nicknamed “Memory Babe” because of his prodigious recall, he likely had the entire novel scripted in his mind before sitting at the typewriter that April day in New York. Indeed, he obsessed over writing. The act of writing, like Sal’s act of traveling, allowed Kerouac to find the ethereal.

-- Marion Blackburn