"This is the biography of writer, poet, and beat generation icon Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), whose novel On the Road catapulted him to the forefront of the literary world and influenced budding writers for generations to come." "Kerouac: The Definitive Biography recounts the story of this exceptional life and the key relationships that affected Kerouac's development as an artist, including those with his three wives, numerous girlfriends, and beloved mother. Kerouac presents a fresh and more accurate account of the author of On the Road, one that neither ignores nor wallows in his flaws but "seeks to do justice to the course and context of his sizeable ambitions and singular achievement."" Kerouac is the first biography based wholly on the vast array of primary source materials contemporary to the events described - letters, postcards, diaries, journals, notebooks, newspaper and magazine articles, legal documents, and television and audio transcripts - sources that provide a view of the intimate thoughts and everyday world of Kerouac throughout the course of his short and tempestuous life.