Jack Kerouac was not interested in irony. Despite his often desperate and mean circumstances, he could find hope and happiness on the road.

Even before his breakthrough novel, "On the Road," was published 50 years ago, among his friends he was the biggest of the Beats, that collection of scruffy poets, musicians, artists -- nonconformists who disdained the gray-flannel mentality of the 1950s. They were the free spirits of a button-down world, credited with inspiring the rebellious 1960s and its rejection of the Establishment.

The friendship with Neal Cassady and the people and experiences that powered the most famous road trips in American literary history really unreeled in the 1940s, just after World War II, at a time when U.S. society was trying to sort out the postwar scene.

Kerouac and Cassady were not launching an anti-establishment political revolution, but mostly trying to meet women, get drunk, avoid responsibility and then maybe write about it.

Purists might take issue with the negative side of Jack Kerouac's biography, but it is impossible to separate fully his life from his work. In its original form, "On the Road" was a roughly told memoir, naming names and re-creating real events shamelessly from the writer's shiftless days with Cassady.

	Click illustration for larger image. Related coverage: 'On the Road' by Jack Kerouac

Shaped and reshaped many times, its final form was pounded out on a 120-foot roll of paper Kerouac made from sheets taped together and fed through his typewriter.

(This scroll was sold by Kerouac's heirs for $2.4 million to Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts in 2001. He's currently exhibiting it around the country.)

Determined to produce a novel in a kind of stream of consciousness approach he called "spontaneous writing," he didn't want to stop to put a fresh piece of paper in the typewriter. He wrote it in three weeks in April 1951. It was a single paragraph more than 80,000 words long.

Kerouac then revised the book again, this time typing it on separate sheets of paper in conventional manuscript form.

It would take six years and seven tries to find a publisher -- Viking Press. And it was a Pittsburgher, Malcolm Cowley, who supported and guided the manuscript along.

By '57, Cowley was a major critic and historian of American literature who was a consulting editor for Viking. He graduated from Peabody High School in 1915, left Harvard for service in World War I (he wrote about the war for the Pittsburgh Gazette, forerunner of this newspaper), lived in Paris and settled in New York and Connecticut.

Writing in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1954, Cowley first credited Kerouac with the Beat Generation label, adding "his long unpublished narrative, 'On the Road,' is the best record of their lives."

At the time, Kerouac was a parking lot attendant, but the finishing of "On the Road" in 1951 released a torrent of words. He would write eight more books before his first success was published. Those titles were released in the years after 1957.

"Malcolm Cowley played an essential part in the discovery of young American writing talent," said Donald Faulkner, editor of "The Portable Malcolm Cowley, co-director of the New York StateWriters Institute at SUNY-Albany and a Pittsburgher as well.

Among his finds were John Cheever, Leonard Cohen and Ken Kesey.

In a series of essays appearing in the early 1950s called "Literary Situations," Cowley singled out several emerging novelists, including "John Kerouac," Faulkner said. "He was one of the few people to take a risk on Kerouac. He knew talent when he saw it."

In turn, the Beats recognized a kindred spirit in Cowley, whose revised memoir, "Exile's Return" in 1951, discussed the young American literary rebels who lived in Paris in the 1920s.

"Cowley was like the real thing to the writers of the '50s," said Faulkner. "He allowed them to see in themselves what he had seen in Paris."

Faulkner called Cowley "the unsung champion of 'On the Road.' He stuck with Kerouac even though they had a testy relationship. Kerouac did not want to be reined in."

In 1955, Cowley wrote to the writer:

" 'On the Road' -- I think that's the right title for the book, not 'The Beat Generation' ... What your system ought to be is to get the whole thing written down fast ... then later go back, put yourself in the reader's place, ask whether and how the first expression ought to be changed. ... If you do that job of revision too then most of your things would be published, instead of kicking around publishers' offices for years."

In its published form, "On the Road" is shorter and full of fictitious names to spare the publisher libel actions from the real people such as William Burroughs, his companion Joan Vollmer Adams (whom he would shoot and kill when the two played "William Tell" with bullets) and the various wives and girlfriends of Neal Cassady and Kerouac.

"On the Road" appeared on Sept. 5, 1957. Positive reviews ran in The New York Times and Village Voice while it was trashed in The Saturday Review and other more conservative publications.

After the book was released, "Jack lay down obscure for the last time in his life," wrote then-girlfriend Joyce Johnson. "The ringing phone woke him the next morning and he was famous."

Kerouac, though, grew bitter and conservative as his alcoholism took hold in the years after his best-known novel appeared. In several memorable drunken public appearances, he denied having any sympathies with the protest movements of the times.

His final moment in the public eye came in late 1968 on William F. Buckley Jr.'s television talk show, "Firing Line." After Buckley cited the Beat icon's "orthodoxy," a shaky Kerouac disowned any link between his writings and the "hippy movement."

"Drunken Jack had made a fool of himself on Buckley Jr.'s television program," wrote writer Gore Vidal, Kerouac's onetime lover, "and then never ceased to admire that profound political thinker."

Kerouac also lashed out at his longtime friend Beat poet Allen Ginsberg for protesting the Vietnam War, telling him, according to Vidal, that the war was "just an excuse for 'you Jews' to be spiteful again."

A year later, Kerouac would be dead at 47, a few days after he was badly beaten in a bar fight. Alcoholism contributed to the cause. It was a sad end to the life of a man once called "beautiful" and whose early books coursed with energy and intelligence.