Jack Kerouac

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.

Of French-Canadian parentage, Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. He "learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens." During World War II, he served as a United States Merchant Mariner; he completed his first novel at the time, which was published more than 40 years after his death. His first published book was The Town and the City (1950), and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957. It made him a Beat icon, and he went on to publish 12 more novels and numerous poetry volumes.

Kerouac died in 1969. Since then, his literary prestige has grown, and several previously unseen works have been published. Kerouac is recognized for his style of stream of consciousness spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as religion and mysticism, childhood, poetry and literature, New York City and the Bay Area in the 40s and 50s, Buddhism, and life. He became an underground celebrity and, with other Beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he despised the hippies and mostly remained uninterested in politics. He has a lasting legacy, greatly influencing many of the cultural icons of the 1960s, including Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Jerry Garcia, and the Doors.