Jack Kerouac

was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922. He won a football scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he met Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, first published in 1957, that made Kerouac one of the most controversial and best-known writers of his time. Publication of his many other books followed, among them The Subterraneans, Big Sur and The Dharma Bums, in which he describes his discovery of haiku. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.

Kerouac’s work, although popular, received little critical acclaim during his lifetime. Today, he is considered an important and influential writer inspiring among others, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Robbins, Lester Bangs, Richard Brautigan, Ken Kesey, and Haruki Murakami.”