On the Road with On the Road

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.Carl M. Moore is an emeritus professor, retired from Kent State University where he taught for 26 years. His university research and my work in the real world has been to figure out how to make it safe for people in groups to say what is on their minds. When that happens, good things get done.