The road Jack Kerouac travelled was longer than we thought. Not only was the famous book just one volume in a series of novels which he saw as a single work, modelled on Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. The 50th anniversary of the first book in the series falls this year. But Kerouac's own life journey was part of the epic of French Canadian displacement. In the late 19th century, nearly a million French Canadians, including Kerouac's parents, moved south to New England to take jobs in the textile mills. Indeed the real "road" could be said to have begun in their home village of St-Hubert-de-Rivière-du-Loup in Quebec, or even in the Brittany from which one side of the family originally hailed. That places Jean-Louis Kérouac not so much as the poet of the beat generation but as a celebrator of the great drama of human mobility that is North America. "There was nowhere to go but everywhere so I just kept rolling under the stars."