Jack Kerouac was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922 and died in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1969. He is best known for his novel On the Road, which was a landmark work of the Beat movement and helped define the counterculture of the 1950s.