Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the "Beat generation" and made Kerouac one of the most best-known writers of his time. Publication of many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur. Kerouac considered all of his autobiographical fiction to be part of "one vast book," The Duluoz Legend. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.
Bill Morgan is an archival consultant, editor, and writer. He is the author and editor of more than 40 books including
I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg;
The Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation;
William S. Burroughs' Rub Out the Word; and
The Letters of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He has worked as the archivist for Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Miller, Oliver Sacks, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among many others.
