Wait, On the Road Was Edited?

By Neal 

David Perry of The Lowell Sun reports that hometown boy Jack Kerouac’s On the Road will be republished next year in a new, unexpurgated edition. The new version will restore several scenes that were deleted from the book in 1957 “because of the censorship of the time,” according to Kerouac’s literary executor, John Sampas—who also notes that while the story about banging the manuscript out on a single scroll in three weeks is true, there were also five years of editing that went into the final version. To put it all back together again, Sampas has recruited “a group of four young Kerouac scholars well-studied in British and American literature” he met at Lowell’s annual Kerouac festival. Anyone want to take odds on whether the deal was sealed over drinks?