'I remember being awed by him and amazed by him' - Alan Ginsberg 'What are writers trying to do? They are trying to create a universe in which they have lived or would like to live. To write they must go there and submit to conditions they may not have bargained for. Sometimes, as in the case of Kerouac, the effect produced by a writer is immediate, as if a generation were waiting to be written.' - William S. Burroughs 'Kerouac came roaring down each highway like a man possessed...Moving on not from a sense of disenchantment, but with a voracious and insatiable hunger for experience.' - Lester Bangs 'I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's' - Bob Dylan

Along with Ginsberg and Burroughs, Jack Kerouac was a leading figure of the avant-garde US literary movement that came to be known as the Beat Generation, which rejected the rigid convention of 1950s America and advocated a new genre of spontaneous, free-form, semi-autobiographical writing. His seminal novel On the Road was a phenomenal success on publication, transforming its author into a counter-culture celebrity and inspiring countless followers.