

He is the author of the poetry collections Scattered Poems (1971), published posthumously, and Mexico City Blues (1959), among others.

Kerouac’s other books of fiction include Desolation Angels (1965), Tristessa (1960), Doctor Sax (1959), The Dharma Bums (1958), The Subterraneans (1958), and The Town and the City (1950). On the Road spoke to many readers, however, expressing their own unarticulated dissatisfaction with the repressive climate of the United States after World War II. In both form and subject, On the Road was completely unlike the formal fiction that dominated the era and was ridiculed accordingly by Kerouac’s contemporaries in the literary establishment, who viewed it as “an insane parody of the mobility of automotive America,” according to Dennis McNally in Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. On a deeper level, it is the story of the narrator’s search for religious truth and for values more profound than those embraced by most of mid-20th century America. On the Road describes the growing friendship of two men, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, and their crisscrossing journeys over the American continent. He became famous as Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road (1957), the novel that is considered to be a quintessential statement of the 1950s literary movement known as the Beat Generation. He studied at Lowell High School, the Horace Mann School in New York City, Columbia University, and The New School.

He spoke only French until the age of seven, and his French-Canadian heritage, along with the Roman Catholic faith in which he was raised, was a strong influence throughout his life. Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac was born on Mato French-Canadian parents in the working-class “Little Canada” neighborhood of Lowell, Massachusetts, a mill town some 30 miles northwest of Boston.
