Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the “Beat generation” and made Kerouac one of the most best-known writers of his time. Publication of many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur. Kerouac considered all of his autobiographical fiction to be part of “one vast book,” The Duluoz Legend. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.
“Kerouac's heartfelt ode to his brother, who died young, and to his
hometown of Lowell, Mass., always fires me up anew about the power
of language, and reminds me that the highest aim of writing is to
jolt us (albeit temporarily) into a more awake and uncertain state
of mind.” —George Saunders, The Week
“Childhood death and family sorrow – the earliest and most
heartfelt chapter of Kerouac’s fictionalized autobiography.” —Ann
Charters
“[T]he heart of Kerouac’s mature fiction . . . [contains] depths
that seem fresh, even revelatory.” —The Washington Post
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