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.

Carl Moore is an emeritus professor, retired from Kent State University where he taught for twenty-six years. His university research and my work in the real world has been to figure out how to make it safe for people in groups to say what is on their minds. When that happens, good things get done. The Los Angeles Times recently called Jim Sampas "the thinking person's producer [who has a] reputation for sticking out of the pack.'' Over the last thirteen years Sampas has produced several internationally acclaimed projects working with such prestigious entertainment companies as Sub Pop, Rykodisc, Atlantic Records, Palm Pictures, Warner Bros., Koch Entertainment, Redeye, Viking Penguin, RED, Razor and Tie, IODA, USA Films, The Orchard, and others. Sampas is also CEO of The Jack Kerouac Foundation, working to pursue funding for the establishment of a Jack Kerouac Museum and Performance Center and co-produce The Town and The City Festival in Kerouac's hometown of Lowell.