Foreword by Allen Ginsberg. 'Kerouac - of the faded jeans, workman's shirt, broken-down shoes, rucksack, high on benzedrine, marijuana or just skid row sweet tokay like the bums in the grass down by the railroad tracks - was your crazy kid brother. If you were a girl, he was that madpoet first love who you never got over, talking wild talk about hopping freight trains and hitching rides. Kerouac conjured up a modern style hero in ‘On the Road’, invented the Beat Generation, fathered a life style and a writing style. A generation weep over his loss, our loss in his drunken untimely death.' 'Behind the 'crazy rebel' of the novels who inspired a whole generation to go hitch-hiking across America in search of 'the myth of the rainy night', lay a life of insecurity and wretched loneliness ... a duality perceptively illustrated by Ann Charters in her lucid, well-researched biography. She has drawn her information from her own meetings with Kerouac and many of his friends, and above all from the autobiographical saga of his fiction.'