On the Road, one of the notable works associated with Jack Kerouac, became the title most closely linked to his name and to the Beat Generation movement with which he was affiliated throughout his career. That association placed him among a recognizable current in American letters, though his output as a novelist, poet, prose writer, and screenwriter extended well beyond any single book.

Born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac in Lowell on March 12, 1922, he was a United States citizen who worked in both English and French. He attended Lowell High School before going on to study at Columbia University. Those early years in Lowell and New York preceded a writing life that produced a substantial and varied body of work. Alongside On the Road, his notable works include The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, Big Sur, and Desolation Angels, titles that together span his activity as a novelist and prose writer.

His occupations, as the record shows them, were multiple: writer, poet, novelist, prose writer, screenwriter. That range resists collapsing his career into a single description. He moved between forms while remaining associated with the Beat Generation movement, a connection that has shaped how his work has been received and catalogued. His authorized Library of Congress name records him as "Kerouac, Jack, 1922–1969," a formulation that holds the span of his life between two dates.

Kerouac died in St. Petersburg on October 21, 1969, at the age of forty-seven. The Library of Congress entry bearing his name and dates — the same entry that formalizes his identity for libraries and readers — remains the institutional anchor through which his works, among them On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, The Subterraneans, and Desolation Angels, continue to be identified and accessed.