Geneva — It's a roll of yellowing, nearly transparent paper, 119 feet 8 inches long by 9 inches wide, covered with tightly packed typing and penciled notes � and worth up to $1.5 million.
The 50-year-old manuscript of Jack Kerouac's landmark novel "On the Road" goes on sale next week in New York, but Christie's auction house gave potential European buyers a chance Tuesday to see the unique manuscript of the novel that defined the Beat Generation.
"This is a very exciting original," said Chris Coover, Christie's Senior Specialist in Manuscripts.
Part of what makes the manuscript so original is its scroll form, born out of the author's failed attempt to write the novel in 1948. Kerouac was looking for a way to set down his thoughts as they occurred to him, Coover said.
Kerouac taped together 12-foot strips of onionskin paper to create the scroll and typed the novel during a marathon 20-day session in New York City in April 1951.
"He began to rethink his approach to writing and had the idea of the scroll as a way to free up his creativity, without editing his ideas, without being literary � just a typed stream of consciousness and no contrivance."
There are no paragraphs in the long typescript, and Kerouac deleted phrases by typing over them or lining them out with a pencil.
The most famous of the writer's works, "On The Road" is thinly fictionalized autobiography, peopled with real-life friends and fellow travelers. Narrated by Sal Paradise, one of the author's alter-egos, the book tells the story of a bohemian odyssey across the United States and Mexico.
No publisher was interested in "On the Road" until 1957, but when the book finally appeared, it quickly acquired cult status as a landmark of the Beat Generation.
The Beats were a group of novelists and poets � including Kerouac contemporaries William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg � who rejected what they saw as the conformist and materialist U.S. culture of the 1950s. They hunted for release through sensation � induced by drugs, sex, modern jazz and Zen Buddhism.
If the Kerouac scroll reaches Christie's valuation of around $1.5 million on May 22, it will still not be the most expensive literary manuscript ever sold at auction. A 1920 script of Franz Kafka's "The Trial" was sold for $1.98 million in 1988.
The highest price tag for a nonliterary manuscript was reached in 1994, when Microsoft chairman Bill Gates paid $30.8 million for Leonardo da Vinci's scientific work known as the Codex Leicester, handwritten between 1506 and 1510.
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