Jack Kerouac (1922 - 1969) was born and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts. The son of working class French-Canadian parents, Keourac attended both parochial and public schools before graduating from Lowell High School in 1939. He received an athletic scholarship to attend Horace Mann School and then in the fall of 1940 went on to Columbia University, where he played football for the freshmen team until he was injured. In the summer of 1942, Kerouac enlisted in the Merchant Marine and served in the North Atlantic. He made a feeble attempt to return to Columbia in the fall of 1942 but became disillusioned with both sports and academics, so he set his sights on being a writer, something he had envisioned since childhood. After his father's death in 1946, Kerouac began writing his first novel, The Town and the City, which was published in 1950. During the next seven years Kerouac wrote as many as eight novels. None was published. Then, in 1957, his best-known work, On the Road, catapulted him to fame as the father of the Beat Generation. During the mid-1950s, Kerouac undertook a study of eastern religion and philosophy which he incorporated into several of his novels and books of poetry. He is often credited with introducing Buddhism to American culture. Kerouac died in St. Petersburg, Florida on October 21, 1969, after suffering acute gastrointestinal hemorrhaging brought on by cirrhosis of the liver. He was forty-seven years old.
Allen Ginsberg (1926 - 1997) was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey. His father was a high school English teacher and a minor poet. His mother suffered from depression and died in 1956 while in a mental hospital. Ginsberg attended Columbia University and was graduated from that institution in 1948. In March of 1957, Ginsberg gained national attention when U.S. customs officials seized his poem "Howl". The resulting trial vaulted Ginsberg to fame, and "Howl" served as a Beat manifesto before Kerouac's On the Road was published in November 1957. During the 1950s, Ginsberg was instrumental in promoting Kerouac and Burroughs by relentlessly seeking publishers for their work. He also established the link between the east and west coast Beat Writers when, in October 1955, he helped to organize the Six Gallery poetry reading where he read "Howl" in public for the first time. Ginsberg is considered the poet laureate of the Beat generation and was an advocate of transcendental mysticism. In the early 1960s, Ginsberg visited India and became immersed in the philosophy of Buddhism. He would later go on to teach at the Naropa Institute, a Buddhist college in Colorado. Throughout his life, Ginsberg was a crusader for social and political reform. Ginsberg is portrayed as Leon Lewinsky in Kerouac's first novel The Town and the City (1950) and Carlo Marx in On the Road as well as other characters in several of Kerouac's books. Click here for a more detailed biography of Allen Ginsberg.
William Burroughs (1914 - 1997) was born in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather was the founder of the Burroughs Adding Machine Company. After graduating from Harvard in 1936, Burroughs traveled in Europe. In 1943, Burroughs moved to Greenwich Village where he met Kerouac and Ginsberg. In 1951, he killed his common law wife, Joan Vollmer, while trying to shoot a glass from the top of her head. He left Mexico before the trial and in the late 1950s lived in Tangier and he became a heroin addict. To purge himself of his guilt over his wife's death, Burroughs turned to writing. In 1966, his most controversial work, Naked Lunch (1959), was cleared of obscenity charges by the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. He was considered by Kerouac and Ginsberg as their intellectual father figure during the late 1940s. As a person who hated authority of all kinds, Burroughs became an underground cult figure. In the last twenty years of his life, Burroughs worked with performance artists in America' s artistic underground.
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