Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the “Beat generation” and made Kerouac one of the most best-known writers of his time. Publication of many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur. Kerouac considered all of his autobiographical fiction to be part of “one vast book,” The Duluoz Legend. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.

Charles Shuttleworth has been studying the work of Jack Kerouac since the late-1980s and first taught a senior elective course on Kerouac and the Beat Generation at the Horace Mann School in New York City in 1994. That year he researched Kerouac's experience at Horace Mann by interviewing three dozen of Kerouac's former classmates (then in their 70s) and presenting his findings at the NYU Conference that Spring. He currently teaches Kerouac and the Beats at the Harker School in San Jose, CA. His ongoing research has been published in Beat Scene (Issues 93, 97, 98, 99), and he was the Parker lecturer for the 2020 Lowell Celebrates Kerouac Festival.