March Literary Birthdays

JACK KEROUAC
March 12, 1922 - October 21, 1969

Kerouac published his first novel in 1950, titled The Town and the City. He was strongly influenced in his writing by the beat generation writers Burroughs and Ginsberg. His best-known work, On the Road (1957) was inspired by cross-country trips taken while under the influence of drugs/drink, as Kerouac was purported to be for most of his life. His novel The Dharma Bums (1958), which describes a mountain climbing trip he and poet Gary Snyder took in Yosemite, contributed to popularising Zen Buddhism as a philosophy for bohemian artists in the U.S. In all, Kerouac published over 20 books.

Some of his works:
On the Road
The Dharma Bums
The Subterraneans
Doctor Sax
Lonesome Traveller
Big Sur
Satori in Paris
Visions of Cody


Search for his books


Other Literary Birthdays

American journalist and novelist Tom Wolfe (1931)
American writer John Irving (1942)
British writer and poet Alan Sillitoe (1928)
Colombian novelist and 1982 Nobelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928)
Japanese playwright Abe Kobo (1924)
U.S. postmodernist writer Donald Barthelme (1931)
British sci-fi satirist Douglas Adams (1952)
American playwright Edward Albee (1928)
Pennsylvania-born novelist and poet John Updike (1932)
New Jersey-born novelist Philip Roth (1933)
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828)
American beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919)
Italian playwright, actor, and director Dario Fo (1926)
Georgian novelist Flannery O'Connor (1925)
American writer on mythology and comparative religion Joseph Campbell (1906)
Mississippi-born playwright Tennessee Williams (1911)
American beat poet Gregory Corso (1930)
NYC novelist Erica Jong (1942)
Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal (1924)
Peruvian novelist and politician Mario Vargas Llosa (1936)
French lyric poet Paul Verlaine (1844)
Ukraine-born Russian realist writer Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809)
Mexican writer and diplomat Octavio Paz (1914)
English novelist John Fowles (1926)