French novelist and essayist born in Brussels, Belgium, who became a US citizen in 1947. Winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, she was the first woman elected to the Acadmie franaise, in 1980, and the seventeenth person to occupy seat 3.
American novelist and poet of French Canadian ancestry, who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.Raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens
