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How long was the paper scroll used for the first draft of On the Road?
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Jack Kerouac
American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac, c. 1965.
The first draft of Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road was written on a paper scroll measuring approximately 120 feet (37 meters) in length.12
Kerouac created this scroll by taping together sheets of paper and feeding them into a manual typewriter, a method he believed would allow him to maintain a fast, uninterrupted pace of writing that he termed "spontaneous prose". He initially hoped to publish the work in its original scroll format to spare readers the need to turn pages, though it was ultimately published as a book in 1957.12