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 mo…
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