Jack Kerouac

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, into a French-Canadian family that spoke French at home; he learned English at school, at about the age of six. A football scholarship took him to Columbia, where a broken leg ended his hopes; he served briefly in the merchant marine, then was discharged from the navy. In New York he met Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, and turned to Buddhism in 1954. Famous overnight in 1957, he afterwards lived mostly with his mother and died in Florida in 1969, aged forty-seven.

In the catalogue 1

• NovelOn the RoadJack Kerouac · 1957Literature