One of those cultural icons who remains alive for generations, writer Jack Kerouac would have been 84 on March 12. Although he died in 1969, the author of 1957's "On the Road" and his friends spawned a current of rebellious creativity that still sparks comedian George Carlin, singers Tom Waits and Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam), actor Johnny Depp and poet/musician Patti Smith, among others. Renowned Beat scholar Ann Charters — whose books include the first Kerouac biography and the two-volume "Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America" — was a junior at the University of California-Berkeley when she attended the first public reading of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg's complete "Howl." She was delighted to reminisce about seminal Beat places.

LOWELL, MASS.

Kerouac Park downtown "honors the writing he did" with granite plaques bearing words from his books. Jack Kerouac was born in this town among "red-brick factories and the river," Charters says. Visit the town cemetery, too: His grave is "a loving place" festooned with flowers, wine bottles and poems left as tributes. "His widow installed a headstone that says, 'He honored life.' " Information: nps.gov/lowe/ker ouac.htm.

NEW YORK

Manhattan is rife with Beat landmarks. Allen Ginsberg lived in a condo at 405 E. 13th St., a building owned by artist Larry Rivers. In Greenwich Village, one of the few women Beats, Diane di Prima, read poetry at the Gaslight Café. On the West Side, Kerouac and then-wife Joan Haverty lived at 454 W. 20th St., where he began writing her a long letter about his recent travels while she waited tables to support them: The letter became "On the Road" — "the bible of the Beat generation," Charters said. He wrote the book itself at the Hotel Chelsea, later the home of the so-called unsung Beat, Herbert Huncke. But the seminal spot, says Charters, is the newsstand at Broadway and West 66th Street, where Kerouac and his girlfriend Joyce Johnson "walked just after midnight, on Sept. 5, 1957," to read The New York Times' glowing review. "By morning, Jack was famous."

NEW ORLEANS

"Lots of bohemians hung out" at the French Market and Jackson Square, Charters says, and there were "people in the square selling cheap art," even in the Beat era. "Jack (Kerouac) passed through when he went there to visit ("Naked Lunch" author William S.) Burroughs, who lived in Algiers across the river," and Kerouac wrote about the quarter in "On the Road."

SAN FRANCISCO

The Beats frequented the North Beach area, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights bookstore on Columbus Avenue — replete with warrens of Beat books — is still a haven for readers and writers who look the part. Ferlinghetti "not only published the Beats but paid royalties," Charters says. The rug store at 3119 Fillmore St. was once Six Gallery, where Ginsberg first read part of his poem "Howl" on Oct. 7, 1955, "a defining moment for the Beats. About 100 people were there" for readings by five poets: Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia. "It set everyone alight. Kerouac was too shy to read, but he passed a hat" to collect donations for the poets.

DENVER

Kerouac's friend Neal Cassady (aka Dean Moriarty in "On the Road") — "the one who galvanized Kerouac and gave him his style," Charters says — lived with his father in Denver's Skid Row, an area "in the middle of town. It's still pretty derelict." Young Neal stole cars, but in reform school he read widely, including the Harvard Classics, and he became a self-taught thinker. In New York he met Ginsberg, who introduced him to Kerouac in 1946. Cassady "was Kerouac's ticket to the West; he opened up the continent for him."

MARIN COUNTY, CALIF.

Gary Snyder and Kerouac climbed Mount Tamalpais, which was sacred to the area's American Indians. "Jack described the climb in "The Dharma Bums." Gary tells Jack he has to 'live pure' and turns him into an environmentalist," Charters says. Information: mttam.net.

BIXBY CANYON, CALIF.

Kerouac stayed at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "little cottage" in the canyon, about 13 miles south of Carmel on Highway 1. By then drinking heavily, Kerouac hid from the world there while he wrote the novel "Big Sur," Charters says.

WASHINGTON STATE

In the early and mid-1950s, Kerouac, Snyder and Whalen all served as fire lookouts for the National Park Service in the North Cascades, Charters says. Kerouac couldn't wait to leave remote Desolation Peak, in the park's Ross Lake National Recreation Area. Information: (360) 856-5700, ext. 515; nps.gov/noca.

DAVENPORT, IOWA

"This is where Jack felt his first feelings for America" as a whole. "This is when he really left the East Coast," says Charters. When Kerouac traveled across the country in summer 1947, he crossed Iowa along Highway 6. In "On the Road," he wrote that Davenport smelled of sawdust, and the farmers looked at him with suspicion.

ROCKY MOUNT, N.C.

Kerouac "practiced his Buddhism" here while staying with his sister, Caroline Blake, in a household that also included their mother, Gabrielle, and Blake's husband and child. Kerouac "took along the family dog when he meditated in the woods," Charters says.