Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, to French-Canadian parents and spoke joual French before English. He attended Columbia on a football scholarship, left, served briefly in the merchant marine, and fell in with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Neal Cassady in New York. His first novel was The Town and the City (1950); On the Road (1957) made him the reluctant figurehead of the Beat Generation. He died at 47 of abdominal haemorrhage linked to long-term heavy drinking.
On the Road is narrated by Sal Paradise, a young writer living with his aunt in New Jersey, and records a series of journeys back and forth across the United States and into Mexico between 1947 and 1950. The engine of the book is Dean Moriarty, a fast-talking, car-stealing, endlessly restless young man from Denver who seems to Sal the embodiment of a wild, joyous American energy.
