Although he was born and raised in Massachusetts, Jack Kerouac's family was French-Canadian, a fact of which he was proud. Published in 1967, when Kerouac was at the height of his fame, this book tells the story of a ten-day visit to Paris and Brittany in search of his ancestors. On this hectic odyssey, fascinated by everything and everyone he met, from a faded French beauty in a Montparnasse gangster bar to one of his strange, foppish Breton namesakes, Kerouac experienced a feeling of transcendence, a "Satori", which was to the Beat generation the culmination of all experience.