American writer Jack Kerouac was BOTD in 1922. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts to French-Canadian parents, he was christened Jean-Louis de Kérouac, and grew up in poverty. A gifted athlete, he won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York, but dropped out to write and become a jazz musician. After serving in the US Marines during World War Two, he returned to New York and became a writer. He befriended a posse of largely queer writers including Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Lucien Carr and William S. Burroughs, whom he christened the “Beat Generation”, becoming one of the leading exponents of the movement. He rocketed to fame with his 1957 novel On the Road, a sex, drug and jazz-infused account of his road trips across America and Mexico with Cassady. Famously written in three weeks during a benzedrine and coffee haze, it became an immediate success, launching Kerouac to literary celebrity. Hailed as a prophet by the 1960s counterculture, he continued to redraft and publish earlier works, including The Dharma Burns and Big Sur, exploring his interest in Buddhism (and himself). Married three times, he had sexual relationships with a number of his Beat Generation buddies, notably Ginsberg and Cassady. His writing, particularly On the Road is suffused with homoerotic longing, and his diaries and letters chronicled the omnisexual adventures of his “agonised cock”. One of America’s most revered writers, he also had his fair share of detractors, notably Truman Capote, who said of his work “That’s not writing, it’s typing”. He died in 1969, after years of struggling with drug addiction, aged 47. He has been played numerous times onscreen, notably by John Heard in Heart Beat, Sam Riley in On the Road, Jack Huston in Kill Your Darlings and Jean-Marc Barr in Big Sur.