Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922 as Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, the son of Québécois parents who were part of a mass migration to New England in the search for employment. The youngest of three children, he witnessed the premature death of his brother, Gerard, an event that profoundly affected him and later moved him to write Visions of Gerard in 1956. As a child, Kerouac attended Catholic and public schools, ultimately receiving a football scholarship to Columbia University in New York City. It was there that Kerouac would meet the other "original" members of the Beat Generation-Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. At one point, Burroughs and...
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