Tony Rossiter
Together with Allen Ginsberg and William S Burroughs, Jack Kerouac was a pioneer of the Beat Generation that influenced American culture in the period following the Second World War. With French Canadian parents, he spoke French until the age of six; he did not speak English confidently until his late teens. He was a poet as well as a novelist, writing poems (and several unpublished novels) in French as well as English, but here we’ll concentrate on the book that made him famous, spawning an entire subculture and generations of imitators, 1957’s On the Road.