Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), the central figure of the Beat Generation, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922 and died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969. Among his many novels are On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and Visions of Cody.

Photo by USGov (National Archives) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Jean-Christophe Cloutier originally hails from Beauport, Québec, and is associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania where he teaches 20th and 21st Century American and African American literature, comics and graphic novels, and archival research methods. He received his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, where he also worked as an archivist in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library processing, among other collections the papers of the infamous Samuel Roth, Erica Jong, and former publisher of Grove Press, Barney Rosset. In 2017-2018, Cloutier was the Sheila Biddle Ford Fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

He is the author of "Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature" (Columbia UP, 2019), which won the Modern Language Association’s Matei Calinescu Prize for a distinguished work of scholarship in twentieth or twenty-first century literature and thought, the Modernist Studies Association’s First Book Prize, and the Waldo Gifford Leland Award from the Society of American Archivists. The book was also shortlisted for the 2020 ASAP Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.

In 2016, he served as a contributor and consultant to The Art institute of Chicago’s 2016 award-winning exhibition of “Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem” and its accompanying catalog. In 2017, he coedited, with Brent Hayes Edwards, Claude McKay’s long-lost novel, "Amiable with Big Teeth," for Penguin Classics—this edition has now been translated into French as "Les Brebis Noires de Dieu" (Nouvelles Éditions Place, 2021).

After years of archival excavation and textual reconstruction, Cloutier edited the original French writings of Jack Kerouac, "La vie est d’hommage" (Boréal, 2016)—this French-language volume is now available in Boréal’s “COMPACT” format (2022). Cloutier has also translated into English two of Kerouac’s French novels for the Library of America volume, "The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings," and contributed an extensive “Translator’s Introduction.”