Using a manual typewriter in a New York City loft, Jack Kerouac produced the original manuscript of On the Road during a three-week period in the spring of 1951. Fifty years and one month later, Colts’ owner Jim Irsay purchased the widely-acknowledged icon of the Beat Generation at a Christies auction in New York, less than a mile from where it was created.

Kerouac produced the continuous scroll by taping pages of semi-translucent paper together to feed the typewriter and write without interruption. The text is single-spaced, without paragraphs, and edited in pencil by Kerouac.

On the Road has been described as the defining novel of the so-called Beat Generation, a disparate group of poets, artists, filmmakers and musicians who shared certain broad philosophical affinities. By far the most popular of Kerouac’s works, it strikingly portrays a mysterious, semi-nomadic subculture dramatically at variance with the conformist and materialistic American culture of the 1950s.

In late 2002, Jim Irsay offered to exhibit the Scroll across the United States. The official tour of the Kerouac Scroll began in Orlando in January of 2004 and is scheduled to conclude at the end of 2009. In addition to Orlando, it has been exhibited at Emory University in Atlanta; Marquette University in Milwaukee; University of Iowa Museum of Art; Las Vegas Public Library; Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, San Francisco Public Library, Denver Public Library and the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It has also been exhibited in Rome, Italy at the Azienda Speciale Palaexpo.