Proposed cover design for On the Road

Jack Kerouac completed the first draft of On the Road in 1951. He described this trial cover design as his “idea of an appealing commercial cover expressive of the book.” Hailed as one of the defining statements of the Beat Generation, On the Road (first published in 1957) tells the story of two friends’ cross-country travels in search of sex, drugs, adventure, and enlightenment. Kerouac’s first novel, The Town and the City (1950), was surprisingly conventional by comparison—“a book as dull as the title and the back photoflap,” he lamented. This early cover design manifests Kerouac’s desire to rebrand himself as a “beat.”