The town is Galloway in Massachusetts, birthplace of the five sons and three daughters of the Martin family in the early 1990s. The city is New York, the vast and heaving melting pot which lures them all in search of futuires and identity. Nearly a decade before the publications of On the Road, the story of the Martins' epic transformation in The Town and the City marked the first true literacy impact of the founding father of the Beat Generation. Inspired by grief over his father's death, and his own determination to write the Great American Novel, The Town and the City is an essential prelude to Jack Kerouac's later classics.