Authors Like Jack Kerouac

Allen Ginsberg

American · b. 1926 · Poet · National Book Award 1974

Ginsberg met Kerouac in New York in the mid-1940s, while he was a student at Columbia, and appears in On the Road as Carlo Marx. He first read “Howl” at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955; City Lights published it in 1956, and in 1957 Judge Clayton Horn ruled at the obscenity trial that it was not obscene. The Fall of America shared the National Book Award in 1974, the year he and Anne Waldman founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. He was a member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association, which he said he joined in defence of free speech.

William S. Burroughs

American · b. 1914 · Novelist

Burroughs was the older figure of the original circle and appears in On the Road as Old Bull Lee. In early 1957 Kerouac and Ginsberg visited him in Tangier and helped type and assemble the fragments that became Naked Lunch, published in Paris in 1959; its title came from Ginsberg's misreading of a phrase in Burroughs' manuscript, which Kerouac urged him to keep. In 1951 in Mexico City he shot and killed his wife, Joan Vollmer; he left Mexico before the trial ended and was convicted in absentia and given a two-year suspended sentence.

Gary Snyder

American · b. 1930 · Poet · Pulitzer 1975

Snyder read at the same 1955 Six Gallery reading as Ginsberg, worked as a fire lookout in the North Cascades in 1952 and 1953, translated the Cold Mountain poems of the Chinese recluse Han Shan, and from 1956 spent most of the next thirteen years in Japan studying Zen, becoming a disciple of the abbot of Daitoku-ji in Kyoto. He is the model for Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums. Turtle Island won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1975.

Every book by Gary Snyder →

Joyce Johnson

American · b. 1935 · Memoirist and novelist · National Book Critics Circle Award 1983

Johnson, born Joyce Glassman in New York, was twenty-one when Allen Ginsberg set her up on a blind date with Kerouac in January 1957, eight months before On the Road came out. Minor Characters, her memoir of those years, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983. She later published their letters as Door Wide Open (2000) and a biography of Kerouac's early years, The Voice Is All (2012).

Diane di Prima

American · b. 1934 · Poet

Di Prima was born in Brooklyn; her first book, This Kind of Bird Flies Backward (1958), came out from Totem Press, run by Hettie Jones and LeRoi Jones, and with LeRoi Jones she edited the newsletter The Floating Bear, which got her arrested by the FBI in 1961 over two poems it printed. Memoirs of a Beatnik appeared from Olympia Press in 1969, Revolutionary Letters in 1971 and her long poem Loba in 1978. She was named poet laureate of San Francisco in 2009.

Thomas Wolfe

American · b. 1900 · Novelist

Wolfe, from Asheville, North Carolina, wrote enormous, rhapsodic autobiographical novels about a young man's hunger for America. His editor at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins, cut the manuscript of Look Homeward, Angel heavily before it appeared in 1929, and condensed a far longer manuscript into Of Time and the River. He died in 1938, aged 37. Kerouac's first novel, The Town and the City (1950), was heavily influenced by him.

Henry Miller

American · b. 1891 · Novelist

Miller wrote first-person, loosely structured, sexually explicit autobiographical novels about being broke in Paris. Tropic of Cancer was published there in 1934 and kept out of the United States by Customs; Grove Press published it in America in 1961, and in 1964 the Supreme Court overruled state findings that it was obscene. He wrote the preface to the Avon paperback of Kerouac's The Subterraneans.

Every book by Henry Miller →

Ken Kesey

American · b. 1935 · Novelist

Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest out of his work as a night aide at the Menlo Park veterans' hospital, where he had also volunteered for government-funded LSD trials. In June 1964 he and the Merry Pranksters set off across America in a painted school bus, Furthur, with Neal Cassady — the model for Dean Moriarty — driving the eastbound leg; in New York, Cassady introduced Kesey to Kerouac and Ginsberg.

Hunter S. Thompson

American · b. 1937 · Journalist

Thompson took the first-person American road narrative into journalism and let the reporter's own state become the story. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, about two drug-fuelled trips to Las Vegas with the lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta, ran in Rolling Stone in November 1971 and came out as a book, illustrated by Ralph Steadman, in 1972. At the Beat Generation conference at New York University in 1994 he said that On the Road convinced him his own writing could find a publisher.

Every book by Hunter S. Thompson →

Charles Bukowski

German-American · b. 1920 · Poet and novelist

Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany, and grew up in Los Angeles. He worked for the US Postal Service for more than a decade, quit in 1969 with financial backing from John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, and wrote Post Office in less than a month. His novels, including Factotum (1975) and Ham on Rye (1982), follow his alter ego Henry Chinaski through drinking, dead-end jobs and bad relationships.