Soon after finishing the scroll, Kerouac went to Giroux’s office to show him the book, elated and exhausted by what he had achieved. “He was in a very funny, excited state,” Giroux recalled. Kerouac unfurled the scroll right across the office “like a piece of celebration confetti.” Startled by the yards of typescript on his floor, Giroux said the worst possible thing: “But Jack, how are we ever going to edit this?” He really meant: How could the words on the unwieldy scroll ever make their way to a typesetter and printer? But Kerouac took it the wrong way and fell into a rage. “This book has been dictated by the Holy Ghost!” he yelled. “There will be no editing!” He rolled the scroll back up and stormed out of the office.
So began another odyssey, the years-long travels of On the Road around New York in search of a publisher. Kerouac quickly retyped the novel as regular typescript that could be submitted to publishers. It made the rounds at Harcourt; Little, Brown; E. P. Dutton; Dodd, Mead; the paperback publisher Ace Books; and the Viking Press, none of which reacted with enthusiasm. A rejection from a Knopf editor was probably typical: “This is a badly misdirected talent. … This huge sprawling and inconclusive novel would probably have small sales and sardonic indignant reviews from every side.”
Enter literary critic Malcolm Cowley, a consulting editor at Viking. On July 3, 1953, Allen Ginsberg, acting as Kerouac’s agent, wrote to Cowley on his friend’s behalf. “I am interested in Kerouac and his work,” Cowley responded. “He seems to me the most interesting writer who is not being published today.” Cowley had already read not only On the Road but also Doctor Sax, Kerouac’s novel of his Lowell, Massachusetts, boyhood, and what Cowley described as “a second version” of On the Road, probably an early draft of Visions of Cody, published after Kerouac’s death. He believed that only “the first version of On the Road” had a chance of publication by Viking. He invited Ginsberg to visit him at the Viking offices.
Viking was not a welcoming port for young Turks: The average age of the five editorial principals—Cowley, Pascal Covici, Ben Huebsch, Marshall Best, and the founder, Harold Guinzburg—was in the 60s. The aimless adventures of a tribe of luftmenschen would have struck four of them as outré and Kerouac’s breathless style as undisciplined. Moreover, On the Road reeked of potential legal trouble. The original draft was sexually explicit for the time, and some of that sex was homosexual. There was a vivid description in the original version of Cassady giving a traveling salesman a “monstrous huge banging” in a hotel room while Kerouac watches from the bathroom. Censors were still eager to prosecute books that offended. In the decade before, Edmund Wilson’s far tamer novel, Memoirs of Hecate County, had been banned as the result of a complaint lodged by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Worse, the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld the ban on appeal. And even as Kerouac was seeking a publisher for On the Road, another hot-potato novel, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, was collecting a long list of emphatic rejections, including one from Viking.
