Fueled by coffee and pea soup, Jack Kerouac speed-typed "On the Road" in just three weeks in April 1951. He'd been traveling America for the past ten years and now, at last, the furious energy of his experiences flowed through his fingertips in a mad rush, pealing forth on a makeshift scroll that he laboriously taped together. The "On the Road scroll" has since become literary legend, and now "Burning Furiously Beautiful" sets the record straight, uncovering, among other things, the true story behind one of America's greatest novels. "Burning Furiously Beautiful" explores the real lives of the key characters of the novel. Ride along on the real-life adventures through 1940s America that inspired "On the Road." By tracing the evolution of Kerouac's literary development and revealing his startlingly original writing style, this book explains how it took years-not weeks-to ultimately write the seemingly sporadic 1957 novel, "On the Road."