The tragedy that killed Jack Kerouac grew from a terrible misunderstanding. When Kerouac’s best and most famous book, On the Road, was published in 1957, most people assumed that its protagonist, the exuberant, irresponsible, fast-talking hipster Dean Moriarty, was Kerouac himself. In fact, Moriarty was modelled on Kerouac’s friend, the juvenile car thief and proto-bohemian Neal Cassady, a man, as the book has it, in whom ‘every muscle twitched to live and go’. 

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