INDIANAPOLIS.- The Indianapolis Museum of Art reunites two of the iconic members of the American anti-establishment “Beat Generation” of the 1950s—novelist Jack Kerouac and photographer Robert Frank—in the exhibition, On the Road Again with Jack Kerouac and Robert Frank. The show includes the original typescript for Kerouac’s 1957 classic novel, On the Road, and 83 photographs taken by Robert Frank during his own two-year cross-country pilgrimage in the 1950s. On the Road will be on display at the IMA from June 26 through September 21, 2008.

Measuring approximately 120 feet in length, the original On the Road manuscript was the result of Kerouac’s 20-day writing frenzy in 1951. Employing “spontaneous prose,” a nonstop, unedited style inspired by letters from his friend, Neal Cassady, the manuscript is comprised of 12-foot-long strips of paper taped together to form a scroll. Kerouac was known as a “lightning typist,” and he constructed the scroll to be fed into a typewriter so that his typing and narrative would not be interrupted by the need to change paper. Because of space restrictions, the IMA will display the first 84 feet of the original scroll until August 11, when the last 25 feet will be unrolled for the remainder of the exhibition.

On the Road charts the adventures of two young men, the narrator Sal Paradise and Dean Moriart (Kerouac and Cassady). Two other characters, Carlo Marx and Old Bull Lee were based on Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. They appear as themselves in the scroll but their names were altered for publication. Their travels to American small towns, cities, and the desert convey the experiences of 1950s outsiders deviating from the materialism and conformity of the era. In their search to live life to the fullest and to find personal freedom, they explore sex, drugs and jazz.

In a room adjacent to the display, visitors can share thoughts and experiences by using a 1950s-era typewriter loaded with a continuous sheet of paper. In addition, a video will showcase footage of Kerouac and interviews with scroll owner Jim Irsay, the owner and CEO of the Indianapolis Colts, and Jim Canary, head of special collections conservation at the Indiana University Lilly Library. Canary was responsible for the scroll’s preservation and has accompanied the scroll on its nationwide tour since 2004.

In addition to Kerouac’s manuscript, the IMA will display the images taken by photographer Robert Frank during his travels across the U.S. in 1955 and 1956. First published in Paris as Les Americains (The Americans) in 1958, the 83 photographs were chosen from more than 28,000 negatives that Frank took of people from all walks of life. Kerouac himself wrote the introduction to the U.S. edition of The Americans. The photographs are on loan from The Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy Andover, Massachusetts.