The Original Scroll - And the Only Word I Had Was "Wow"

120 feet went on the typewriter, never stopping tlack tlack tlack of black ghosts hunting paper until they are set free. Three weeks went on the coffee, or what it stood for, bebop rapsody of black liquid down the throat, down the veins, down out of the fingers and into the typewriter, hitting the unexperienced paper with memories of“it”.

51 years after those three weeks, the original scroll runs inside its glass shrine at the British Library, aged and yet untouched in its essence like the road that wrote it. It's the late published, first written version of On the Road, the very novel that opened my life to the Beat Generation, the “ fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars” and “it”.

I hit the road with Robert Frank and “saw the best mind of my generation starving hysterical naked” and followed my own Dean and Neal. Stumbling on my typewriter, I travelled along the road, went out of the map, left the path, lost myself and found the road again. The road is always there, beyond the walls of your mind, behind the bricks and ill-fitting automated lives on the edge of sanity.

Still typing, still on the road, and still looking for “it”.

The manuscript scroll is at the British Library until December 27.