An intimate biography of the writer who has become an American icon. More than fifty years after the publication of On the Road, Jack Kerouac is more read and revered by a new generation than ever before. Why this is so is the subject of Barry Miles's fresh and revealing portrait of the writer who is the acknowledged leader of the Beat movement, the group of writers that included Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, who together influenced the direction of writing and culture more than any group of artists since England's Bloomsbury. From his birth in blue-collar Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922 to his years at Columbia University during World War II where he first met Allen Ginsberg and all the wild times that followed with friends such as Neal Cassady and Gary Snyder, here is the story of Jack Kerouac's life as never told before. Barry Miles draws on his close friendship with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs to offer new insight into both the exuberance and dismay of the man who inspired a whole generation to take to the road. Kerouac is now an icon, an image, an attitude, and a new generation looks to him as a symbol of freedom. Barry Miles shows us Kerouac the man and Kerouac the leg, his longing for greatness and the consequences of achieving it.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 317-323) and index.

Barry Miles (known as Miles) ran a bookstore in London in the 1960s devoted to Beat literature and was a close fri of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. He is the author of Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now.