Portrait of Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac, 1952 (photo)

Jack Kerouac (1922 – 1969) was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his method of spontaneous prose.Thematically, his work covers topics such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel. He became an underground celebrity and, with other beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement; Neal Leon Cassady (1926 – 1968) was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic and counterculture movements of the 1960s; photo taken by Carolyn Cassady