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Jack Kerouac’s original typescript scroll for On the Road – the 37 metre (121ft) long roll of paper on which he typed his defining Beat novel in a three-week burst – will go under the hammer at Christie’s in March, with a sale estimate of £1.8m to £2.9m ($2.5m to $4m).
The scroll is one of the centrepieces of the Jim Irsay Collection, one of the most extensive private collections of music, literary, film and sports memorabilia ever assembled.
The scroll will be offered at a live Christie’s auction in New York on 12 March as part of a series of four sales drawn from the Jim Irsay Collection. Alongside it will be the original typescript scroll of Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, estimated to sell for between £218,000 to £364,000 ($300,000 to $500,000).
Kerouac wrote the first draft of On the Road over three weeks in April 1951, taping together sheets of tracing paper to avoid changing pages as he typed. The novel, published in 1957 after extensive revision, became a touchstone of postwar American literature, and helped define the Beat generation’s rejection of conformity, materialism and social restraint.
“This is the original and only scroll for the first draft of Kerouac’s masterpiece,” said Heather Weintraub, specialist in the Christie’s books and manuscripts department. “It’s widely considered to be the most iconic artefact of the Beat Generation, [and] one of the most celebrated artefacts in American literature. This scroll is one of the most important literary documents still in private hands.”
“When you roll it out it actually looks like a road. There are no paragraphs or chapters and it uses the real names of the characters before the publisher asked Kerouac to change the names.”
However, the return of the scroll to the auction block echoes an earlier controversy. In 2001, when the manuscript was last offered for sale, Carolyn Cassady – the former wife of Neal Cassady, the real-life inspiration for the novel’s Dean Moriarty – denounced the auction as “blasphemy”, arguing that the scroll belonged in a public library rather than a private collection. “Jack loved public libraries,” she said at the time, adding: “If they auction it, anybody rich could buy it and keep it out of sight.”
Irsay, who died last year, was best known as the owner and CEO of American football team the Indianapolis Colts, a role he held for nearly three decades. He built the Jim Irsay Collection over many years, amassing manuscripts, instruments and cultural artefacts connected to key moments in 20th-century music, literature, film and sport, which he frequently loaned for public exhibition.
“I personally hope that a public institution will buy it so it can be seen by everyone,” Weintraub said. “But we can also hope that if someone [privately] buys it they will follow Jim Irsay’s example and show it publicly – he toured it around for years.”
Nearly 400 items from the Jim Irsay Collection will be exhibited free to the public at Christie’s Rockefeller Plaza galleries from 6 to 12 March, preceding the auctions.
Other highlights from the 12 March sale include Paul McCartney’s handwritten lyrics for Hey Jude, an affidavit filed by McCartney in 1970 to dissolve the Beatles with annotations by John Lennon, Sylvester Stallone’s handwritten Rocky script notebook, and Jim Morrison’s journal.
