Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922. In 1947, enthused by bebop, the rebel attitude of his friend Neal Cassidy, and the throng of hobos, drug addicts and hustlers he encountered in New York, he decided to discover America and hitchhhike across the country.

His writing was openly autobiographical and he developed a style he referred to as 'spontaneous prose' which he used to record the experiences of the Beat Generation. Among his many novels are On the Road, Maggie Cassidy, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums and Big Sur. He died in 1969.

William S. Burroughs was born on February 5, 1914 in St Louis. Despite graduating from Harvard in 1936 with a degree in English Literature, Burroughs spent a number of his early years working in a variety of often unpleasant positions, including those of cockroach exterminator, factory worker and advertising copywriter.

In work and in life he expressed a constant subversion of the morality, politics and economics of modern America. To escape these, and in particular his treatment as a homosexual and a drug-user, Burroughs left the US in 1950, and soon after began writing.

By the time of his death he was widely recognised as one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the twentieth century. His numerous books include Naked Lunch, Junky, Queer, Nova Express, Interzone, and The Wild Boys.

After living in Mexico City, Tangier, Paris, and London, Burroughs finally returned to America in 1974, settling in Lawrence, Kansas, where he lived and worked until his death in 1997.