Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.

Of French-Canadian ancestry, Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. He "learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens." During World War II, he served in the United States Merchant Marine; he completed his first novel at the time, which was published more than 40 years after his death. His first published book was The Town and the City (1950), and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957. It made him a beat icon, and he went on to publish 12 more novels and numerous poetry volumes. CONTENTS:

The Novels The Town and the City (1950) On the Road (1957) The Dharma Bums (1958) Doctor Sax (1959) Maggie Cassidy (1959) Book of Dreams (1960) Big Sur (1962) Visions of Gerard (1963) Desolation Angels (1965) Vanity of Duluoz (1968) Visions of Cody (1972)

The Novellas The Subterraneans (1958) Tristessa (1960) Satori in Paris (1966) Pic (1971)

The Poetry Mexico City Blues (1959) The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (1960) Old Angel Midnight (1973)