In the wake of receiving the Joan Anderson letter, Jack Kerouac began to theorize upon a new literary method that he believed would come to reflect the preoccupations of the age. The method came to be known as “spontaneous prose” and was the hallmark of the Beat Generation’s literary aesthetic. The central tenet of spontaneous prose was that writing should mimic the immediacy of lived experience; that by dispensing with planning, editing, revising, and even proper grammar and punctuation, in the belief that “first thought is best thought,” as Allen Ginsberg later described it (via allenginsberg.org), a new literature could be established that better described the ecstasies and abjection of post-war America.

According to Britannica, in 1958, a year after the bombshell publication of “On the Road” made him a major literary celebrity, Kerouac published in the Evergreen Review an essay clarifying the principles of his signature style, titled “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” which declared: “Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image” (per the University of Pennsylvania). Kerouac recommended writing in an “uninhibited” state of “semi-trance” — just as he had supposedly done in the writing of “On the Road.”

When it comes to inspiration, it wasn’t just jazz, Walt Whitman, and spiritualism that got the Beat Generation going. In fact, the Beats became famous for their “anything goes” attitude — which included their well publicized use of drugs, particularly stimulants, to get their creative juices flowing.

A commonly used drug in Beat circles in the late ’40s and early ’50s was Benzedrine, an over-the-counter that Brigham Young University claims was an amphetamine, with similar properties to the street drug speed, which was typically administered using an inhaler. However, Kerouac’s preferred method of consuming the drug involved breaking the inhalers open and swallowing whole the Benzedrine-laced cotton inside. The dose was enough to fuel marathon writing sessions with the writer’s mind racing, allowing Kerouac to write in a “semi-trance” and with, as he put it, “no pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatological buildup words till satisfaction is gained, which will turn out to be a great appending rhythm to a thought and be in accordance with Great Law of timing” (via the University of Pennsylvania).

“The Town and the City” had been a highly fictionalized version of his early life in Lowell, Massachusetts, but by the time he was ready to write “On the Road,” Jack Kerouac had made the decision to abandon fictionalization as much as possible and attempt to write an account of his own true lived experience on the road in the late 1940s. He wrote, “Renounce fiction and fear. There is nothing to do but write the truth. There is no other reason to write” (per “On The Road: The Original Scroll“).

One of Kerouac’s great idols was the French writer Marcel Proust, whose seven volume novel “In Search of Lost Time” dramatizes the arduous cataloguing of the memories of a lifetime. Kerouac’s new apparent vision of “On the Road” as a feat of confessional recall — that would recall his experiences honestly — was inspired by Proust’s work, notes The Guardian. Among his friends and acquaintances, Kerouac was known for his incredible powers of recall; as a child, he had been given the nickname “memory babe” (per Santa Monica Public Library), and his gift for remembering minute details, turns of phrase, and even whole conversations that happened years earlier came to feed into his writing practice.

“Three weeks” was Jack Kerouac’s reply to Steve Allen in 1959 when asked how long it took him to write “On the Road” (via YouTube). But though the “original scroll” of “On The Road” and the three weeks it took to make it do stand up as historical fact, whether it is technically true that Kerouac can be said to have “written” the novel in that period is debatable — with many contemporary academics going as far as to say the legend of Kerouac’s epic writing session is actually better described as a myth, as per NPR, for two reasons.

First, it has been well-documented that Kerouac had not just made copious notes on his travels during the late 1940s, but that he had also taken multiple attempts to write his follow up to “The Town and the City.” In his essay “Fast This Time: Jack Kerouac and the Writing of ‘On the Road'” (via On the Road: the Original Scroll“), Howard Cunnell argues that in attempting to write a sequel to his first novel, Kerouac wrote three “major proto-versions” of “On the Road” between 1948 and 1951, and demonstrates through Kerouac’s letters to Neal Cassady how revisions began the month after the scroll was completed. The scroll would go through several major redrafts — eliminating much of the original’s graphic material and replacing the real names of Kerouac’s friends with pseudonyms — as Kerouac searched for a publisher and before the novel’s eventual release in 1957.

“In the early 1950s, the nation recognized in its midst a social movement called the Beat Generation. A novel titled ‘On The Road’ became a bestseller, and its author, Jack Kerouac, became a celebrity. Partly because he had written a powerful and successful book, partly because he seemed to be the embodiment of this new generation.”

So said Steve Allen by way of introducing Kerouac on his show in a famous interview and reading from 1959 (via YouTube). “On the Road” made Kerouac a star overnight, and he maintained his place at the vanguard of American literature with a slew of further releases including the 1958 novella “The Subterraneans,” written in the style of Neal Cassady’s “Joan Anderson” letter that, true to the spirit of spontaneous prose, was written in a single three-day session.

But as Kerouac became a cult figure and found himself idolized by the emerging 1960s counterculture, his life began to unravel. Kerouac was an unwilling icon, and the “King of the Beats” increasingly struggled with depression and alcoholism throughout the 1960s, notes the New Yorker. Kerouac wrote about how his fame consumed him in “Big Sur” (1962), perhaps his darkest novel. On October 21, 1969, Kerouac died of a hemorrhage, per The Los Angeles Times. He was 47.

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