Kerouac manuscript rolls onto auction block

The manuscript for one of the most influential American novels of the 20th century goes on sale today in New York.

Christie's auction house hopes the 50-year-old manuscript for Jack Kerouac's On the Road will fetch upwards of $2 million.

Whoever buys it will get nothing like any book many have ever seen a tight roll of onionskin paper covered in dense typing and pencil markings.

A frustrated Kerouac taped together 3.5-metre-long sheets of paper and sat down in New York to bang out the novel in a marathon 20-day session. When he was done, he had more than 36 metres of paper covered in typing with no paragraph breaks.

That was April 1951. The novel wasn't published until 1957, and when it was it immediately became a cult classic of the Beat Generation.

The book resonated with a generation of young people who were rejecting the conformist and materialistic world of 1950s America.

"It's been really striking the number of people who come to see it and just stand in awe," said Chris Coover, Christie's manuscript specialist. "And people have been moved to tears."

Kerouac was born in 1922 to French-Canadian parents in Lowell, Massachusetts. On the Road is a fictionalized autobiography depicting a bohemian odyssey across America and through Mexico.

The novel also shows Kerouac's position in the pantheon of American writers, says scholar Ronna Johnson.

"He's a pivotal writer right on the cusp between modernism in American letters and just the beginning of post-modernism, breaking down the distinctions between high art and mass art," said the literature professor at Harvard.

Both Coover and Johnson worry the manuscript will be bought by someone with enough money not just to outbid the others, but to keep it locked away from the public.