A report on Beat Generation and On the Road

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), 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.

His first published book was The Town and the City, and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957.

Neal Leon Cassady (February 8, 1926 – February 4, 1968) was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic and counterculture movements of the 1960s.

He was prominently featured as himself in the "scroll" (first draft) version of Jack Kerouac novel On the Road, and served as the model for the character Dean Moriarty in the 1957 version of that book.

As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation.

In the first chapter of his 1957 novel On the Road Kerouac described the meeting between Ginsberg and Cassady.

This was the first major work published by Kerouac, who later became famous for his second novel On the Road (1957).

The novel is focused on two locations (as suggested by the title): one, the early Beat Generation circle of New York in the late 1940s, the other, the nearly rural small town of Galloway, Massachusetts that the main character comes from, before going off to college on a football scholarship.

Beat Generation writers such as Jack Kerouac and libertine writers such as the Marquis de Sade also had a strong influence on Morrison's outlook and manner of expression; Morrison was eager to experience the life described in Kerouac's On the Road.

Pynchon explicitly acknowledges his debt to Beat Generation writers, and expresses his admiration for Jack Kerouac's On the Road in particular.