How original hipster Jack Kerouac tried to craft his own book cover design for ‘On the Road’

What Lies Beneath: The author coined the phrase ‘Beat Generation’

Kerouac's suggested cover for 'On The Road'

Neal Cassady (left) and Jack Kerouac

Kerouac's suggested cover for 'On The Road'

The Crawford in Cork city

The Clock Winds Down

JACK KEROUAC's cover design

Neal Cassady (left) and Jack Kerouac

Niall MacMonagle

March 12 2023 02:30 AM

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac was born on this day in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, to devout Catholic parents from rural French-speaking Quebec. The young boy spoke French for the first six years of his life.

While at high school in Lowell, Kerouac was offered a football scholarship to Columbia University, but his football career ended after a broken leg, and he dropped out. He remained living in New York’s Upper West Side, where he befriended many of the people who would later fill his books.

In 1942, aged 20, he briefly worked on the construction of the Pentagon in Washington DC, before joining the US merchant marine. In 1943, he enlisted in the US navy reserve. Branded “an indifferent character”, he was discharged a month later.

All this time Kerouac had been writing. His first novel, The Town and the City, was published in 1950 – but he made his name with On the Road, published seven years later.

Written in three weeks and rewritten in 20 days, it tells of Kerouac and his friend Neal Cassady, as they make their way back and forth across America. The character of Sal Paradise is Kerouac and Neal Cassady became Dean Moriarty.

The first-person voice is immediate and engaging, it tells us that “nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody bedsides the forlorn rags of growing old”. Kerouac coined the phrase ‘Beat Generation’ to describe his and Allen Ginsberg’s, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s and Gary Snyder’s writing using street language and a direct, confessional, spontaneous tone.

Kerouac's suggested cover for 'On The Road'

Kerouac sent this image – his suggested cover design – to his publisher with the typed note: “Dear Mr Wyn, I submit this as my idea of an appealing commercial cover expressive of the book. The cover for The Town and the City was as dull as the title and the photo backflip. Wilbur Pippin’s photo of me is the perfect On the Road one… it will look like the face of the figure below. J.K.”

Kerouac’s design consists of two roads, one marked ‘Frisco, Denver, Chicago’, the other ‘LA, Texas, St Louis’. Both roads lead to New York. The diagonally arranged words ‘On the Road’ and the city names are in red, as is the figure’s collar.

Dated 1952, he announces it as a modern prose novel – and he’s not shy: it’s ‘By JOHN KEROUAC KEROUAC, KEROUAC’. Kerouac also sketched a house, a pool with the word ‘splash’ beside it and other squiggles and shapes. The Kerouac figure is on the road carrying a bag.

But his proposal wasn’t heeded.

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The US edition of the book instead featured a small abstract image in stars and stripes colours against a black background. The first UK edition cover featured two men – one in a white T-shirt and baseball cap looking relaxed, smoking and sitting on the ground beside a bus stop. His eye is on the road ahead. The other figure stands bespectacled in a red Hawaiian shirt, arms akimbo. In the background the words ‘Liquor, Girls, Fun, Jazz’.

“Nothing behind me, every- thing ahead of me, as is ever so on the road,” says Kerouac.

Married three times, Kerouac was undone by liquor. He came to the end of the road in 1969, aged 47. He was buried in Lowell.

His On the Road manuscript – a 120-foot long scroll consisting of single-spaced, typed, 12-foot-long rolls of paper sellotaped together – sold for $2.43m in 2001.

On show: Two to view

The Clock Winds Down

The Clock Winds Down
Brian Maguire

Brian Maguire’s passionate concern for justice is evident in his paintings of war-torn Aleppo, the plight of immigrants and prisoners. These works focus on the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Visiting remote villages in Brazil, he Maguire captures on canvas the social and ecological crisis, the neglected indigenous population, what Ed Vulliamy calls “the war on the world”.
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin 2, until April 8

The Crawford in Cork city

Site of Change
Evolution of a building

Built in 1724 and originally a customs house, what is now Crawford Art Gallery in Cork is depicted in an exhibition in its very galleries. Images and objects across the centuries tell of the building’s former appearance, how it has adapted and grown, and its role in the cultural life of Cork city.
Crawford Art Gallery, until November 12