Zach Bryan buys original Jack Kerouac ‘On The Road’ scroll for $12.1 million
Popular country musician Zach Bryan is now the proud owner of the original On The Road scroll, the 1957 classic American novel written by Jack Kerouac.
The ‘Sun on Me’ singer made the winning bid of $12,135,000 for the important Beat Generation manuscript, as confirmed by Rolling Stone.
He made the purchase at Christie’s Jim Isray auction on March 12th, where it was originally estimated to sell for between $2.5 and $4million.
The auction house, Christie’s, has since confirmed that this makes it the highest price anyone has ever paid for literature at auction.
Famously, Kerouac’s manuscript comes in the form of an almost 120-foot scroll of paper; he taped the paper together in April 1951, when he wrote the novel over the course of three weeks on his typewriter.
The original scroll uses the real names of his friends, such as Neal Cassady, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Lucien Carr, while the published 1957 novel switches these out for pseudonyms.
Bryan is a Kerouac fanatic: In 2025, the 29-year-old bought the St Jean Baptiste Church in Lowell, Massachusetts, which he plans to convert into a museum celebrating Kerouac in the writer’s home city. It has been suggested that the scroll will therefore be shown in the forthcoming museum.
There were plenty of other notable sales at the same auction; Pink Floyd frontman David Gilmour’s famous Black Strat, which collector Jim Irsay bought for $3,975,000 in 2019, was sold for $14.55 million, making it the most expensive guitar ever sold.
Bryan previously shared that his single, ‘Burn burn burn’ is inspired by his “favourite” quote from Kerouac’s On The Road, namely, “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or a saw a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
Earlier this year, Bryan released a 25-track album, With Heaven On Top, which he closely followed with an acoustic version of the work.
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