Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" gets the full 50th anniversary treatment next month, and both cheerleaders and hand-wringers acknowledge that it radically changed American culture — somehow or other.

In an introductory essay to the newly published original manuscript, English novelist Howard Cunnell calls it "a markedly darker, edgier, and more uninhibited text than the finished book."

The official version dances around the subject of homosexuality: Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and Kerouac all hooked up. And it bowdlerizes the encounter with a gay man who gives them a ride: "Neal proceeded to handle [him] like a woman, tipping him over legs in the air and all and gave him a monstrous huge banging. I was so non-plussed all I could do was sit and stare from my corner." In the published novel, this becomes: "Dean asked him how much money he had. I was in the bathroom."