Jack Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Kerouac, in Lowell, Massachusetts on March 12, 1922. The youngest of three children, he spoke a local dialect of French called joual before he learned English. Kerouac published his first short story, 'The Brothers', right out of high school, while attending a post graduate program at Horace Mann Prep School in New York City. From there, he went on to study at Columbia University on a football scholarship. Although he attended Columbia for only one year, he became good friends with Allen Ginsberg (see "And shocks of hospitals and jails and wars...", Methadone pretty [phrases] and "Moloch whose Soul is electricity..."), William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, among others. It was this core group of writers, led by Kerouac, who grew to fame and came to be called the Beat Generation.

Kerouac's first novel, 'THE TOWN AND THE COUNTRY', was well received but did not make him famous. He would not be published again for nearly ten years. The spontaneous and unrestricted prose style that would come to define his work emerged later in novels like 'THE DHARMA BUMS' and ON THE ROAD. He died in 1969 at just 47 years of age.