page_title: Jack Kerouac
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Jack Kerouac / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: A street sign of Jack Kerouac Alley. Français&#160;: Panneau annonçant l'entrée dans la Jack Kerouac Alley, à San Francisco. Simple English: A street sign showing Jack Kerouac Alley, in San Francisco, California.
context_page_description: Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, better known as Jack Kerouac, was an American author and poet. He was part of the Beat Generation movement of writers and artists of the 1950s and 1960s, and gave the movement its name. His most famous work was a long novel titled On the Road, which was published in 1957.
  Kerouac was a friend of writers Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gregory Corso, among many others. Nearly all of Kerouac's writings were directly based on his own life, but he mostly changed names and details, to protect everyone's privacy. The man he wrote about most was his friend Neal Cassady, who was called "Dean Moriarty" in On the Road. Kerouac influenced many other writers and poets who came along later, and also many musicians of the 1960s, through his works. He also changed the way Americans saw themselves, and their country.
context_section_description: Kerouac's works, especially On the Road, are now more popular than ever. Generations have discovered his works, as a means of learning about life and attitudes in America during his lifetime, as a way to measure their own sense of experience, or as examples of free association and stream of consciousness in creative writing. 
  Less than half of Kerouac's writings were published during his lifetime, but nearly all are now available. The ones published later drew hundreds of times more money than his most famous works, when they first appeared. His hometown Lowell remembers Kerouac today with a memorial, and cultural events every year. His grave now has a headstone, which reads "He honored life". A street in Lowell was renamed "Jack Kerouac Alley" in his memory.
caption: A street sign showing Jack Kerouac Alley, in San Francisco, California
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