Jack Kerouac died, as he had spent much of his adult life, writing. The morning of October 20, 1969, he was sitting in front of his television at his home in St. Petersburg, Florida, jotting down notes when a vein in his stomach ruptured. A hard-drinking man, Kerouac had been a walking time bomb for years. His youthful athletic frame had long ago given way under the pressure of an erratic life-style and too much hard liquor: Twenty hours later, after numerous transfusions, he was dead. Kerouac was only forty- seven when he died; an old forty-seven with decades of writing behind him, and thousands of miles traveled in a ceaseless seeking after the "It" he had first talked about in the novel On the Road--the vision, the reality underlying the seemingly random and meaningless events of life in the twentieth century.

Only two months earlier the nation had...