In the six years it took for On the Road to be published, American culture changed dramatically: Elvis Presley altered the course of popular music James Dean and Marlon Brando emerged as a new breed of brooding teenage icon the painter Jackson Pollock came and went, his action paintings and the intense way he lived some kind of precursor to the 'nowness' that the Beats strived for in both art and life.

The novel recounts, in a breathless and impressionistic style, his travels to and fro across America, often in the company of his friend and prime influence, Neal Cassady, renamed Dean Moriarty in the book. Remarkably, On the Road was actually written in 1951 when, so the story goes, Kerouac typed the words over three uninterrupted weeks on to a 120ft scroll of teletype paper, fuelled by Benzedrine and strong coffee. It would be hard to imagine Hunter S Thompson's deranged Seventies road novel, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, had On the Road not laid down the template - likewise films such as Easy Rider, Paris, Texas, even Thelma and Louise. At least two great American photographers were influenced by Kerouac: Robert Frank, who became his close friend - Kerouac wrote the introduction to The Americans - and Stephen Shore, who set out on an American road trip in the Seventies with Kerouac's book as a guide. Tom Waits, too, acknowledged its influence, hymning Jack and Neal in a song, and calling the Beats 'father figures'. 'It changed my life like it changed everyone else's,' Bob Dylan would say many years later. Unwittingly, and to his increasing horror, Kerouac had written a zeitgeist book, one that would help determine the course of what would come to be known as youth culture over the following two decades.

It also, as Kerouac's friend and fellow Beat writer, William Burroughs, witheringly wrote, 'sold a trillion Levi's, a million espresso coffee machines, and also sent countless kids on the road'. 'Challenging the complacency and prosperity of postwar America hadn't been Kerouac's intent when he wrote his novel,' his first biographer, Ann Charters, later wrote, 'but he had created a book that heralded a change of consciousness in the country.' In the few years following its publication, On the Road became a major bestseller. It would continue to do so for the rest of his short life, and for many decades afterwards. The ringing phone woke him next morning and he was famous.' Overnight, the Beat generation had gone overground, and the man who did most to define it suddenly found that his book was now defining him. Afterwards, they had walked back to Johnson's apartment on the Upper West Side where, as she memorably put it: 'Jack lay down obscure for the last time in his life.

Jack kerouac on the road first edition