Jack Kerouac, regarded in modern American fiction as the authentic voice of the "beat generation," thought of himself as a storyteller in the innovative literary tradition of Proust and Joyce, creating an original style that he envisioned as "the prose of the future." He wrote with the same theme of idealism as Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman, reasserting the American dream of romantic individualism in each of his eighteen published books, which he regarded as one vast autobiographical statement.

Kerouac (Jean Louis Lebris De Kerouac) was born to French-Canadian parents in Lowell, Massachusetts on 12 March 1922. He attended local Catholic grammar schools and graduated from Lowell High School with an athletic scholarship to Columbia University (he starred in football and track) after a year at Horace Mann School in New York. During his sophomore year at Columbia, he left to join the U.S. Merchant Marine and Navy during...