He began a novel and continued writing after his return to New York City, where he was close friends with Alien Ginsberg and William Burroughs, Jr. His first published novel,
The Town & the City (1950) was begun after his father's death in 1946. Kerouac later dismissed it as a fiction based on the model of Thomas Wolfe, written before he had found his own voice.
In April 1951, when he spent three weeks writing an autobiographical narrative on a 120-foot roll of teletype paper that was to be published nearly seven years later as On the Road, Kerouac found his style. He called it "spontaneous prose," and during the period between 1951 and 1956 he wrote several books which were considered too stylistically innovative to find publishers. During the long, disheartening wait before On the Road was accepted by Viking Press, Kerouac worked a series of jobs as a railroad brakeman and fire lookout, traveling between the East and West coasts, saving his money so he could live with his mother while he wrote what he conceived of as his life's work, "The Legend of Duluoz."
"The Legend of Duluoz," or "The Legend of Kerouac" (Duluoz was Kerouac's fictional name for himself in three of the novels), is a fictionalized autobiography, one of the most ambitious projects conceived by any modern American writer in its scope, depth, and variety.
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