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.

Jacques Beckwith (1920-2000) was an artist and carpenter living and working during the 1950s and 60s. He was a founding member of the Hansa Gallery, one of the legendary downtown New York galleries clustered around E. I 0th Street during that period. Lois Sorrells Beckwith (b. 1935) is a poet and artist still living near the cabin that Jacques built in Cornwall, CT. She dated both Jack Kerouac and Lucien Carr and later married Jacques Beckwith.".