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Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel on the road is thought of as one of the defining works of the beat generation.

It's a loosely autobiographical story of his journeys across the country in post-war America.

The filmmaker Eves Brnoe says the book became a blueprint for the way many people think about

hitting the road and finding freedom. In his documentary, Bernou tells the story of

Karowak in his book. And he also profiles modern Americans who have taken to the road themselves.

And one of the things that comes up in the film is this myth of how Karowak wrote it, how he taped

together these sheets of tracing paper, some 120 feet long, and he fed them into his

typewriter like a scroll so he could keep the words flowing in a process of spontaneous prose.

The Kerouac scholar Jean-Christophe Clotier is in the film, and he says this was actually

a deliberate method of writing. It was rooted in rhythm and jazz and

caroac's own bilingual background. But the idea that he was just pecking away at the keys,

that the book was formless and written without intention, that's the myth some in the literary

establishment were reacting to. They dismissed on the road as hippie self-indulgence,

as meandering and incoherent.

Truman Capote put it this way.

That's not writing.

It's typing.

Here's Clotier.

What's always struck me as ironically funny about that quip is that it might be accurate in the sense that Kerouac had already written the bulk of what became on the road in his notebooks and roadlogs and diaries.

And then he surrounded himself, as he always did for his whole career, with his notebooks and his archives and his notes,

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