The son of French Canadian parents who had immigrated to the United States, Jack (Jean-Louis Lebris de) Kerouac was born in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts. He grew up in a French-speaking household, first learning English at the age of six, when he began to attend school. After America entered World War II, Kerouac enlisted in the Merchant Marine but was eventually dismissed on medical grounds due to his erratic and psychologically unbalanced behavior. He returned to New York’s Columbia University, where he had a football scholarship. In the late 1940s Kerouac met a number of fringe bohemian characters such as Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, who were experimenting with new ways of artistic expression as well as with drugs. Kerouac also met at this time Neal Cassady, an uneducated drifter and a manic depressive with a magnetic personality. During the period 1947-49 the two traveled widely in the United States. On the Road fictionalizes Kerouac’s years with Cassady (renamed Dean Moriarty in the story). Credited with inventing the term “beat generation,” Kerouac became an unwilling media figure, whom the press identified with the new “beat” movement and its ideas. Much of his personal story and his qualities as a writer were essentially ignored.
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