The town and the city

J. Kerouac

The Town and the City is essentially an autobiographical novel, though less directly so than most of his other works. The novel is focused on two locations: one, the early Beat Generation circle of New York in the late 1940s, the other, the nearly rural small town of Galloway, Massachusetts that the main character comes from, before going off to college on a football scholarship. The experiences of the young "Peter Martin" struggling for success on the high school football team are largely those of Jack Kerouac.