The purchaser of Jack Kerouac‘s original On the Road manuscript, famously typed onto a nearly 120-foot scroll of paper, at Christie’s Jim Irsay auction on Thursday is country artist and Kerouac fanatic Zach Bryan. Rolling Stone confirmed through a rep that Bryan placed the winning bid of $12,135,000 for the Beat generation relic.
Auction house Christie’s, which sold the item as part of the Jim Irsay Collection, had estimated On the Road to sell for between $2.5 million and $4 million. Irsay, the late owner of the Indianapolis Colts, had paid $2.43 million for the scroll in 2001, according to The Herald-Times. At the time, Christie’s confirmed it was the highest price anyone had ever paid for literature at auction.
Kerouac wrote On the Road over the course of three weeks in April 1951 using paper taped together. The scroll format allowed him to feed the paper through his typewriter at a speed that matched his thought pattern. The scroll notably used the real names of his friends, notably his close friend Neal Cassady and Beat generation luminaries William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Lucien Carr, among others, as he recounted bopping around the country in search of adventure. Upon its 1957 publication, with replacement names, On the Road turned Kerouac into the generation’s leading voice.
Bryan, a confirmed Kerouac superfan who drew inspiration from On the Road for his “Burn, Burn, Burn,” purchased the Saint Jean Baptiste Church in Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, last year. Billboard reported at the time that he and the Jack Kerouac Estate hoped to turn the church, where Kerouac was once an altar boy and where Kerouac’s funeral was held, into the Jack Kerouac Center.
“We’ve been working on this deal with Zach and his team for several months,” the Kerouac estate’s Sylvia Cunha said at the time. “He stepped up and delivered in a big way, showing incredible generosity. Our immediate focus is to bring the building up to code so we can start using the space for music and other events while forming new partnerships to help us bring this vision to life and ensure its lasting success.”
The On the Road scroll was part of Christie’s auction of Irsay’s collection of pop cultural and historically significant items. Notable items that hit the auction block included Ringo Starr’s drums, Kurt Cobain’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and Pink Floyd frontman David Gilmour’s famous “Black Strat,” which Irsay bought for $3,975,000 in 2019. On Thursday, the Black Strat sold for $14.55 million, making it the most expensive guitar ever sold.
