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Colorado Literary Happenings

Denver Library Celebrates 50th Anniversary of “On The Road”

By Jenny Shank, 12-19-06

The Denver Public Library is gearing up for a celebration of the 50th anniversary of beat icon Jack Kerouac's most famous book, On The Road. The centerpiece of the festivities will be a display of the On The Road scroll in the Central Denver Public Library from January through March. According to a press release, the library will exhibit "the original 120-foot scroll on which Kerouac wrote his first typewritten draft of On The Road."

The book is significant for Denver because a good portion of it takes place here, where Kerouac meets up with pal Neal Cassady, who is called Dean Moriarty in On The Road. Kerouac writes that Moriarty "used to beg in front of Larimer alleys and sneak the money back to his father, who waited among the broken bottles with an old buddy, then when Dean grew up he began hanging around the Glenarm poolhalls; he set a Denver record for stealing cars and went to the reformatory."

In On The Road, Kerouac's alter-ego, Sal Paradise turns giddy when he enters Colorado: "And soon I realized I was actually at last over Colorado, though not officially in it, but looking southwest toward Denver itself a few hundred miles away. I yelled for joy. We passed the bottle. The great blazing stars came out, the far-receding sand hills got dim. I felt like an arrow that could shoot out all the way."

The opening ceremony for the scroll exhibit will feature musician and friend of Kerouac David Amram (January 6, 2-3:30 p.m., Central Library). The Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library will screen the beat film "Pull My Daisy," (January 5, 8-10 p.m.). Amram will perform a concert entitled "The Musical Roots of Kerouac's Prose" at El Chapultepec (January 6, 6-8 p.m.). A walking tour about the places Kerouac haunted in town entitled "A Lilac Evening, Jack Kerouac in Denver" will embark from the Central Library (January 7, 10 a.m.-1 p.m.), and finally there will be a tribute to Hunter S. Thompson ("From Kentucky to Colorado - The Literary and Journalistic Legacy of Hunter S. Thompson") at the Central Library (Sunday, January 7, 2:30-4 p.m.).

Another good resource for Kerouac fans to check out is the website Neal's Denver, which features an online walking tour of the places where Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac hung out.

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