Kerouac did, however, suck. ;)
--- On Fri, 4/17/09, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
>
> BTW, did anyone else get to see the original scroll of On
> the Road when it was, well, on the road? FWIW, the
> exhibit made it very clear that this witticism of Capote's
> (one of my favorites) wasn't in any way true. Kerouac spent
> a couple years filling notebooks with sketches for the book.
> Then after reading them all, he typed out the first draft in
> a fury. And then afterwards he marked it up by hand
> very minutely -- there's crossing out and re-writing
> everywhere. According to the accompanying material,
> Kerouac never originally claimed he'd written it in 3
> weeks. It was an artifact of a talk show snippet. He
> at first denied it, considering it an insult to his craft,
> but once it became lore, he eventually stopped fighting it
> and milked it along with other parts of his celebrity.
>
> BTW, in the scroll version (which is now published, and
> which I read), everyone has their real names, which
> personally made it more fun for me.
>
> Michael
>>