On the Road Visualised

Rhythm Textures

Visually representing Kerouac's sentences by using their punctuation to create circular diagrams. Each word is represented by a line, and the thickness of the lines radiating outwards from the center point provides a record of the pauses.

Literary organism

The structure of On the Road visualised using a simple tree structure. Chapters divide into paragraphs, paragraphs divide into sentences, and sentences divide into words, colour coded according to key themes.

Sentence Drawings

All of the sentences are represented here by the lines, but have been organised according to the number of words par sentence. The sentences are colour-coded according to themes.

Sentence Length

Stefanie Posavec

Writing Without Words

Jack Kerouac: On the Road

Scroll the Road

Jack Kerouac's hand-drawn cross-country road trip map from 'On the Road'

"Jack Kerouac wrote On The Road in one feverish burst, letting it pour onto pages taped together into one enormously long strip of paper – a format he thought lent itself particularly well to his project, since it allowed him to maintain his rapid pace without pausing to reload the typewriter at the end of each page. When he was done, he marched into his editor Robert Giroux's office and proudly spun out the scroll across the floor. The result, however, was equal parts comical and tragic:

"To [Kerouac's] dismay, Giroux focused on the unusual packaging. He asked, "But Jack, how can you make corrections on a manuscript like that?...Jack, you know you have to cut this up. It has to be edited." Kerouac left the office in a rage. It took several years for Kerouac's agent, Sterling Lord, to finally find a home for the book, at the Viking Press.""

Celia Blue Johnson

Maria Popova