Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac, the father of the Beat Generation, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922. He attended Columbia University, briefly, on a football scholarship, but an injury forced him to quit after his freshman season. After dropping out of university, Kerouac continued to live in New York City, where he would meet Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs, the future stars of the Beat Generation. Kerouac’s first novel, The Town and the City, was published in 1950 and received little attention, but it was the publication of his second novel, On the Road (1957), that would ultimately win him literary celebrity. He is the author of On the Road, The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, Lonesome Traveler, Desolation Angles, Dr. Sax, and Mexico City Blues, as well as the co-author with William S. Burroughs of the previously unpublished novel And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Kerouac died of an internal hemorrhage, in 1969.