Jack Kerouac, central figure of the Beat Generation and one of the most important writers in American literature of the twentieth century, was born in Massachusetts in 1922 and died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, he was educated at a Jesuit school, and then to stand as a football player received a scholarship to study at the University of Columbia. "I read and studied all my life alone. Columbia preferred to stay in my room reading Céline instead of the classic "say later. During World War II, he joined the Navy, from which he was discharged shortly. Back in New York, in 1944 he met Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. In 1951 he published The Town and the City, his first novel. Between 1951 and 1952 he wrote Visions of Cody, published over twenty years later. The publication in 1957 of the novel On the Road, written in three weeks, set to the beat generation in the literary and social scene and made Kerouac in his main reference. He wrote, among other works, Underground (1958), The Dharma Bums (1958), Big Sur (1962), Satori in Paris (1966) and a book of poetry Mexico City Blues (1959).