Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac was an American writer born on 12 March 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, into a French-Canadian family. He grew up speaking French at home and came to English later. He studied briefly at Columbia University in New York, where he met Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, friends who would shape the Beat Generation. Through the late 1940s and 1950s he travelled widely across North America and Mexico, working odd jobs and drawing on those journeys for his fiction. He wrote in a fast, flowing, improvised style that he called spontaneous prose, influenced by jazz, Buddhism and his own memories. Many of his books form a loosely connected account of his life, with the names of real people changed. His best-known novel brought him sudden fame and made him a figure of youthful restlessness, a role he found uneasy. He struggled with drinking in later years and died on 21 October 1969, aged 47. His work remains widely read and has influenced generations of writers, musicians and travellers.