Beat writer Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922.
Kerouac grew up in a French-Canadian family in Lowell, an industrial city along the Merrimack River. French was his first language, and his early experience there later informed the sense of place and identity in his fiction.
He attended Columbia University in New York after a football scholarship brought him there. His time in New York connected him with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, relationships that became central to the Beat literary circle.
Kerouac is often associated with New York and San Francisco because of his travels, but Lowell was his birthplace and remained an important imaginative home. The city is also the setting for the Jack Kerouac–related literary heritage celebrated by the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac festival.