In conformist 1950s America, Jack Kerouac's On the Road was greeted with both delirium and dismay, but in Kerouac's hunt for the big experience and his longing for greatness, he has inspired each successive generation.

Jack Kerouac is now an icon, and this provocative and intimate portrait of one of the twentieth century's most influential writers, reveals a man full of contradictions, rarely at peace with himself. Barry Miles, friend and official biographer of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, provides a meticulously researched exploration of the complex man and extraordinary writer whose creative mishmash of joyous incoherence, drug-induced ecstasy, genuine mysticism and constant craving has persuaded so many to take to the road.