After Kerouac dropped out of Columbia University, he served on several different sailing vessels before returning to New York to write. He met and mixed with Beat Generation figures Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. Between 1947 and 1950, while writing what would become "The Town and the City" (1950), Kerouac engaged in the road adventures that would form "On the Road". Kerouac carried small notebooks, in which much of the text was written as the eventful span of road trips unfurled. He started working on the first of several versions of the novel as early as 1948, based on experiences during his first long road trip in 1947. However, he remained dissatisfied with the novel. Inspired by a 10,000-word rambling letter from his friend Neal Cassady, Kerouac in 1950 outlined the "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" and decided to tell the story of his years on the road with Cassady as if writing a letter to a friend in a form that reflected the improvisational fluidity of jazz. In a letter to a student in 1961, Kerouac wrote: "Dean and I were embarked on a journey through post-Whitman America to FIND that America and to FIND the inherent goodness in American man. It was really a story about 2 Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him."