Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac  (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), often known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist of French Canadian ancestry, who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.

Jack Kerouac’s 30 bullet point list titled: Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, contains great gems on the art of writing and living. The list was included in Portable Jack Kerouac, a compilation of Kerouac’s novels, poetry, letters, and essay.

In the book, Portable Jack Kerouac, the editor writes:

KEROUAC WAS INTERESTED in writing, rather than writing about writing, and he made few efforts to explain or theorize about his work. “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose,” thirty terse, sometimes enigmatic phrases and commands, was an attempt to describe what he was
doing, but “The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” was a more extensive effort.

He wrote it at the request of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs in the fall of 1 953, after he had shown them the manuscript of The Subterraneans. His friends were so impressed by the fact that he’d written the entire book in three nights sitting at a table in the kitchen of his mother’s apartment in Queens that they asked him to describe how he’d done it.