Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, to French-Canadian parents, and he spoke French at home before he spoke English. He was a gifted athlete, and football took him to Columbia University in New York. A broken leg and a restless mind ended that, but New York gave him what he really came for: a circle of friends who wanted to live and write differently. Among them were Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and a fast-talking young man from Denver named Neal Cassady.

In the late 1940s Kerouac crossed and recrossed the country, often with Cassady, by car, bus and thumb. He tried to write about it in the careful style of his first novel, The Town and the City (1950), and it wouldn’t come. Then, in April 1951, he fed a long roll of taped-together paper into his typewriter so he would never have to stop to change the page, and in about three weeks he typed the whole book in one long burst. It was On the Road.

Publishers didn’t want it. For six years it went unpublished while Kerouac kept moving and kept writing, filling notebooks with what he called spontaneous prose: writing fast, like a jazz musician blowing a solo, without going back. When Viking finally published On the Road in September 1957, a review in The New York Times hailed it, and Kerouac woke up famous. He had once used the phrase “Beat Generation” in conversation with a friend, and now it was a label the newspapers hung on him.

Fame suited him badly. He was shy and serious, and he was often treated as the spokesman for a youth movement he didn’t much like. He kept writing: The Dharma Bums (1958), about mountain climbing and Buddhism with the poet Gary Snyder, thinly disguised; The Subterraneans; Big Sur. But he drank heavily, and he spent his last years living quietly with his mother.

He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at 47. The original scroll of On the Road, about 120 feet long, sold at auction in 2001 for more than two million dollars, and it has since toured the world like a holy relic, unrolled under glass.