I found this recently in a Barnes and Noble, and just had to have it.... I picked it up shortly after having seen the movie.

Have actually been reading this and am almost finished with it, so will be making an extensive journal entry soon.....

I don't know where to begin here, having read what many consider to be an American epic, part of the lineage reaching back to Huck Finn.....
I guess I need to start by saying that I first read "On the Road" while home on leave from the Navy, gettting ready to go to Spain for two years; my parents had gotten a bed they put in their basement for me to sleep in, and during the course of that month (it was standard procedure to give 30 days leave before going overseas), falling into that bed after a night of partying with friends, I read it, having purchased it at a bookstore in Pensacola, Florida, my previous duty station. So much of it resonated with me, as I kept thinking about what kinds of adventures I would have once I was finished with my military service - especially since Kerouac made a lot of references to GI Bill money and that sort of thing.
I know that the veterans returning from World War II faced a different situation that I did (and at the time I read it, the Vietnam War was technically still going on - Saigon would fall a few months later), yet so much of what happened in the book has a lot of similarities to adventures I've had in my own life. My hitchhiking tales don't rival the escapades these characters had, though there have been times when I've met folks who I swear had to have been in the book.... for instance, once, when driving across northern Missouri, I picked up an old hobo thumbing, bound for Saint Joe, saying he was going to ride the rails all the way to Cheyenne, Wyoming.
When I told my brother Brian (who, while married to his first wife, had read the book - his wife had even told me, for instance that Bull Lee was William S. Burroughs and Carlo May was Allen Ginsburg) I was reading the "Original Scroll", he said it was because I probably still had some wanderlust left in my soul (almost something Neal Casady hisself would have said).
There have been a lot of stories circulating about how the book was written - I'd originally heard that Kerouac had gotten a roll of butcher paper and fed it into the typewriter; but apparently he taped together several sheets of tracing paper he'd gotten from an artist friend - and this is how it was portrayed in the movie.
This particular edition is useful because of the essays preceding the text, providing not only reflections of it's effect on people but also telling the tale of how it took six years to get to publication, as well as other interesting stories surrounding the lives of the characters.
I've got to say that I'm now prompted to go back and re-read the edition that made it to publication, as well as Visions of Cody, which I understand also evolved as yet another version.
As a final note, there were a couple slight inaccuracies I noted early in the manuscript, when telling of traveling through Iowa - first of all, there is a reference to Rapid City (which is in South Dakota) which had to be Cedar Rapids; secondly, there are two stops in a town called Stuart - the first of these is most certainly Newton. I figured these out because he went through these places before getting to Des Moines (coincidentally my current residence).
Maybe residents of other states will find similar errors regarding other towns, or the order in which he traveled through them.....

Sending this off as a RABCK to spfldjohn, who had it on his wishlist. Enjoy!

Received this book in the mail today.

Thanks BigJohnLefty