American novelist, the central figure of the Beat Generation — the postwar American countercultural movement that, out of New York and San Francisco in the late 1940s and 1950s, pushed against the conformism of the Eisenhower years with a gospel of mobility, ecstasy, jazz, drugs, Eastern religion, and a restless existential hunger for what Kerouac called "IT." Born Jean-Louis Kérouac to a French-Canadian family in Lowell, Massachusetts, he came to Columbia on a football scholarship, fell in with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and the other nascent Beats, and between 1947 and 1950 made the cross-country road trips with Neal Cassady that would, in a legendary three-week 1951 burst on a continuous scroll of teletype paper, become On the Road (published 1957).
On the Road made him a celebrity and — against his desires — the symbol of a generation. The book is not an existentialist novel in the French school sense but stands in recognizably the same tradition as Sartre and Camus: a search for authentic existence, performed at velocity, against a modernity experienced as dead. The Dharma Bums (1958) turned the search toward Zen Buddhism, under Gary Snyder's influence. Big Sur (1962) is the sober, terrible book about the wreckage of the road years. The Duluoz Legend — his attempt, in Proust's manner, to make all the novels into a single continuous autobiographical fiction — was never quite completed.
He drank himself to death in 1969 at age 47, politically reactionary in the last years, at odds with the counterculture that had claimed him. His Catholic-Buddhist longing, the French-Canadian Lowell of his childhood, and the ecstatic prose rhythm he called "spontaneous bop prosody" are the three things the Kerouac legend most often gets wrong.