Jack Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical novel — the last that he published before dying in 1969 — follows alter ego Jack Duluoz through his early life: his childhood in Lowell, Massachusetts; his time on the football field at Columbia; and his naval service during World War II. Like Duluoz, Kerouac dropped out of Columbia after his football career was sidelined by a broken leg. But the friendships that he made there, over endless drinks at the West End bar, came to shape a generation of fiction.
