| Neal Cassady | |
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 Neal Cassady, left, with Jack Kerouac, photograph by Carolyn Cassady. |
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| Born | February 8, 1926 Salt Lake City, Utah |
| Died | February 4, 1968 (aged 41) San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico |
| Occupation | Author, poet |
| Nationality | American |
| Genres | Beat poet |
| Literary movement | Beat |
| Notable work(s) | The First Third |
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Neal Leon Cassady (February 8, 1926 – February 4, 1968) was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic movement of the 1960s, perhaps best known for being characterized as Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road.
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Cassady was born to Maude Jean Scheuer and Neal Marshall Cassady in Salt Lake City, Utah.[1] After his mother died when he was ten, he was raised by his alcoholic father in Denver, Colorado. Cassady spent much of his youth living on the streets of skid row with his father, or spending time in reform school.
As a youth, Cassady was repeatedly involved in petty crime. He was arrested for car theft when he was 14, for shoplifting and car theft when he was 15, and for car theft and fencing when he was 16. In June 1944 Cassady was arrested for receipt of stolen property, and served eleven months of a one-year prison sentence.
In October 1945, after being released from prison, he married the sixteen-year-old LuAnne Henderson. In 1947, Cassady and his wife moved to New York City, where they met Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg at Columbia University. Although Cassady did not attend Columbia, he soon became friends with them and their acquaintances, some of whom later became members of the Beat Generation. He had a sexual relationship with Ginsberg that lasted off and on for the next twenty years[2], and he later traveled cross-country with Kerouac.
Cassady was the basis for the character Dean Moriarty in Kerouac's On the Road, and Cody Pomeray in many of Kerouac's other novels. In the surviving first draft of On the Road, which Kerouac typed on a 120 foot roll of paper he constructed for that purpose, Dean Moriarty is named "Neal". Ginsberg mentioned Cassady in his ground-breaking poem, "Howl" as "N.C., secret hero of these poems..." Additionally, he is commonly credited for helping Kerouac break ties with his Thomas Wolfe-inspired sentimental style (as seen in The Town and the City) and discover his own style through "spontaneous prose", a stream of consciousness type of writing first used in On the Road.
After Cassady's marriage to LuAnne Henderson was annulled, Cassady married Carolyn Robinson on April 1, 1948. The couple eventually had three children and settled down in a ranch house in Monte Sereno, California, 50 miles south of San Francisco, where Kerouac and Ginsberg sometimes visited. Cassady committed bigamy by briefly marrying a woman named Diane Hansen two years after he married Carolyn Cassady. During this period, Cassady worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad and kept in touch with his "Beat" acquaintances even as they became increasingly different philosophically.
Following an arrest during 1958 for offering to share a small amount of marijuana with an undercover agent at a San Francisco nightclub, Cassady served a sentence at San Quentin State Prison. After his release in June 1960, he struggled to meet family obligations, and Carolyn divorced him when his parole period expired in 1963. Cassady shared an apartment with Allen Ginsberg and Charles Plymell in 1963 at 1403 Gough Street, San Francisco.
Cassady first met author Ken Kesey during the summer of 1962, eventually becoming one of the Merry Pranksters, a group who formed around Kesey in 1964 and were proponents of the use of psychedelic drugs. During 1964, he served as the main driver of the bus Further, which was immortalized by Tom Wolfe's book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He later played a prominent role in the California psychedelic scene of the 1960s.
In Hunter S. Thompson's book Hell's Angels, Cassady is described as "the worldly inspiration for the protagonist of two recent novels," drunkenly yelling at police at the famed Hells Angels parties at Ken Kesey's residence in La Honda, an event also chronicled in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Although his name was removed at the insistence of Thompson's publisher, the description is clearly a reference to the character based on Cassady in Jack Kerouac's works, On the Road and Visions of Cody. His name appears explicitly in the 50th anniversary edition of the original scroll of On the Road (On the Road: The Original Scroll, Viking 2007). Cassady also appears in Ken Kesey's book Demon Box as "Superman" in the chapter "The Day After Superman Died".
In January 1967, Cassady traveled to Mexico with fellow prankster George "Barely Visible" Walker and longtime girlfriend Anne Murphy. In a beachside house just south of Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, they were joined by Barbara Wilson and Walter Cox. All-night storytelling, speed drives in Walker's Lotus Elan and the use of LSD made for a classic Cassady performance – "like a trained bear," Carolyn Cassady once said. Cassady was beloved for his ability to inspire others to love life. Yet at rare times he was known to express regret over his wild life, especially as it affected his family. At one point Cassady took Cox, then 19, aside and told him, "Twenty years of fast living – there's just not much left, and my kids are all screwed up. Don't do what I have done."
During the next year, Cassady's life became less stable and the pace of his travels became more frenetic. He left Mexico in May, traveling to San Francisco, California; Denver, Colorado; New York City, New York and points in between: then returned to Mexico in September and October (stopping in San Antonio, Texas on the way to visit his oldest daughter who had just given birth to his first grandchild); visited Ken Kesey's Oregon farm in December; and spent the New Year with Carolyn at a friend's house near San Francisco. Finally, during late January, 1968, Cassady returned to Mexico once again.
On February 3, 1968 Cassady attended a wedding party in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico. After the party he went walking along a railroad track to reach the next town, but passed out in the cold and rainy night wearing nothing but a T-shirt and jeans. In the morning, he was found in a coma by the track and taken to the closest hospital, where he died a few hours later on February 4, four days short of his forty-second birthday.
The exact cause of Cassady's death remains uncertain. Those who attended the wedding party confirm that he took an unknown quantity of Secobarbital, a powerful barbiturate sold under the brand name of Seconal, that can easily lead to overdose. Cassady was not a heavy drinker, though he may have participated in a toast to the bride and groom. The physician who performed the autopsy wrote simply "general congestion in all systems;" when interviewed later he stated that he was unable to give an accurate report, because Cassady was a foreigner and there were drugs involved. 'Exposure' is commonly cited as his cause of death, although his widow disputes this and believes he may have died of renal failure.[3]
Ken Kesey wrote a fictional account of Cassady's death in a short story named "The Day After Superman Died", where Cassady is quoted mumbling the number of railroad ties he had counted on the line (sixty-four thousand nine-hundred and twenty-eight) as his last words before dying. It was published as a part of Kesey's 1986 collection Demon Box.
Cassady's autobiographical novel The First Third was published posthumously in 1971, three years after his death. His complete surviving letters are published in Grace Beats Karma: Letters from Prison (Blast, 1993) and Neal Cassady: Collected Letters, 1944-1967 (Penguin, 2007).
Cassady lived briefly with The Grateful Dead and is immortalized in their song "The Other One" as the bus driver "Cowboy Neal." [4][5] A second Grateful Dead song, "Cassidy," by John Perry Barlow,[6] might seem to be a misspelling of Cassady's name; in fact the song primarily celebrates the 1970 birth of baby girl Cassidy Law into the Grateful Dead family, though the lyrics also include references to Neal Cassady himself.
A New York City based folk duo, Aztec Two Step, in their 1972 debut album memorialized Cassady in the song "The Persecution & Restoration of Dean Moriarty (On The Road)."
The Beat-inspired folk revival band the Washington Squares released a song named "Neal Cassady" on their 1989 album Fair and Square.
The Doobie Brothers guitarist and songwriter Patrick Simmons refers to Cassady in his song "Neal's Fandango" as his incentive for taking to the road.
North Jersey-based progressive rock band Children of Dust pay tribute to Cassady in their song "Neal Cassady."
The progressive rock band King Crimson released a song named "Neal and Jack and Me" on their 1982 album Beat.
Tom Waits composed and recorded a song named "Jack & Neal" (included in his 1977 "Foreign Affairs" album) about a travel to California, with Neal Cassady driving in the company of Jack Kerouac.
Cassady and his life and friendships were portrayed in the 1980 film, Heart Beat, starring Nick Nolte as Cassady. The ending of the film depicts him as misunderstood by his more youthful Merry Pranksters cohorts. The film was based on Carolyn Cassady's memoir of the same name.
The film The Last Time I Committed Suicide, with Thomas Jane as Cassady, was released in 1997 and is based on the "Joan Anderson letter" written by Cassady to Jack Kerouac in December 1950. Although much of this letter had been lost, a surviving remnant was originally published in an early 1964 edition of John Bryan's magazine Notes from Underground.
A 2007 film, Luz Del Mundo, deals with Cassady's friendship and adventures with Jack Kerouac. Cassady is played by Austin Nichols and Kerouac is played by Will Estes.[7]
Another film, the biopic Neal Cassady, was also released in 2007[8]. This film focuses more on the Prankster years and stars Tate Donovan as Neal, Amy Ryan as Carolyn Cassady, Chris Bauer as Kesey, and Glenn Fitzgerald as Kerouac. Noah Buschel wrote and directed the film. The film deals primarily with how Neal became trapped by his fictional alter-ego, Dean Moriarty. The Cassady family criticized this film as highly inaccurate. [9]
Cassady is portrayed by Jon Prescott in the film, Howl[10], which chronicles the creation of the poem "Howl"[11] by Alan Ginsberg and the obscenity trial surrounding its publication.
Neal Cassady (February 8, 1926 - February 4, 1968) was a member of the Beat Generation circle of writers and poets, of the 1950s and 1960s. He was a close friend of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and was the main inspiration behind Kerouac's breakthrough novel On the Road. Later he was the bus driver of Ken Kesey's "Merry Pranksters", during the hippie era.
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Cassady was born in Salt Lake City, literally "on the road", as his mother gave birth to him while his parents rode in a car. They later separated, with his father raising young Cassady in Denver, Colorado. He got into trouble often as a boy, and spent part of his teen years in a juvenile facility. While locked up, he began to write letters back and forth with Hal Chase, another member of the (then-future) Beat Generation. Chase told his friends Kerouac and Ginsberg about Cassady, who wanted to meet him. After he was released, Cassady traveled to New York, marrying sixteen-year-old LuAnne Henderson on the way. He met Ginsberg, and began a homosexual relationship with him (despite Cassady's marriage), and a friendship with Kerouac, recently divorced, who began to teach Cassady about writing. Kerouac's mother, whom he lived with, did not like Cassady, sensing he was just a con artist. Kerouac knew this was at least partly true, but he did not mind, since he enjoyed Cassady's company. They looked a little like each other, and strangers who met them often guessed the two were brothers. They became very close personally, and felt that they really were brothers, though they came from different parents.
Cassady was a restless person, and his wife got tired of him not giving their marriage the attention it needed. She left him, and returned to her family. Cassady soon forgot about her, and started relationships with other women, and also with men. (He and LuAnne got back together later, but their reconciliation did not last.) Before long, he decided he wanted to travel. Cassady was an expert driver, and had no trouble driving cars at over 100 miles per hour, over long stretches of highway. Kerouac left his mother behind, and joined Cassady on many road trips, across the United States and even into Mexico. When Kerouac got sick in Mexico City, Cassady could not wait for him to get better, and left Kerouac behind at a hospital. Kerouac had to find his own way home, and was angry at Cassady, while Kerouac's mother thought it just proved her suspicions about him. Cassady turned up later, asking Kerouac's forgiveness, which he gave him. Good or bad, Kerouac's experiences with Cassady were what he needed to finish a novel about cross-country travel, which he had wanted to write for years.
Kerouac was now married again, to Joan Haverty, and in trying to explain his friendship with Cassady to his new wife, he typed a long narrative, using a roll of teletype paper so he did not have to stop to change pages. He spent three weeks working on the narrative almost non-stop. It became the manuscript for his new novel, which he called On the Road. His wife was bothered by the fact that he spent more time working on the manuscript than with her, and separated from him not long after it was finished. Kerouac spent the next six years making changes and improvements to the manuscript, until a publisher agreed to print it as a book. Cassady's name was changed to "Dean Moriarty", to make the book appear more fictional than it really was. Kerouac delivered one of the first printed copies of On the Road in person to Cassady, who did not give Kerouac the reaction he expected. Instead of being happy and proud, Cassady seemed disturbed and scared, by knowing that part of his life was now in print, and his character documented for the public to see.
On the Road was published in 1957, and it made both Kerouac and Cassady famous. It did not do much to help their personal lives, however. Both men suffered from public overexposure, as the book became a best-seller. A mistake on the book's jacket made readers think that both men were much younger than they were. Their adventures in the book had happened years earlier, but many people thought they were recent. Some readers wanted to travel with them, or invite them to wild parties, or have sexual intercourse with them. Cassady enjoyed the attention for awhile, but it took its toll on him personally. Fame did not help his second marriage, to Carolyn Robinson, or the family they had together. Kerouac himself hated all the attention he got, and spent most of his time at home with his mother, working on new books, or drinking alcohol. In time, he became an alcoholic, and it ruined his health.
Cassady also partly inspired Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and was mentioned in the poem as "N.C.", the "secret hero" of Ginsberg's latest writings. Howl became a landmark work of the 1950s, and added to Ginsberg's and Cassady's fame. Ginsberg handled fame more easily than either Cassady or Kerouac, and had a long public career.
Cassady himself wanted to become a writer, or a jazz musician, but he was not a success at either. He tried to take saxophone lessons, but did not stay with them very long. He mostly worked as a laborer or a brakeman on railroads, before and after On the Road was published. Some of what he did write was published as a memoir, titled The First Third, but it was his only book. He was more successful at writing letters to friends. One was about his seductions of different women during a train trip. He recorded long talks with Kerouac and Carolyn, about their lives and thoughts, and parts of these went into a later book by Kerouac, titled Visions of Cody. ("Cody Pomeray" became Cassady's new fictional name, as Kerouac changed publishers.)
Cassady also sold marijuana to help pay his bills. One customer turned out to be an undercover policeman, who arrested Cassady. He spent a long time in jail. Carolyn had to both work, and try to raise their children alone.
Freed from jail, Cassady began to travel again. During the 1960s, he joined Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, who traveled back and forth across the United States in a bus, holding "acid tests", a name for LSD parties. Cassady drove the bus. He acted as merrily as anyone, and as full of energy as a young man, when the Pranksters were around. In private, though, he was not enjoying his life, and old friends noticed he looked very tired.
Cassady had tried to commit suicide a few times when he was younger, and was unhappy. Once he tried to freeze himself to death, waiting outside in cold temperatures during a car trip, but it took too long, and he got back in the car. Early in 1968, while revisiting Mexico, he was found lying alongside a railroad track, where he had been for a long time. Exposure to harsh weather caused his death, just days short of his 42nd birthday. Nobody knew if he was trying to kill himself or not, this time. A few people who knew him felt that he wanted to die, and had for awhile as he got older, and that Cassady finally got his wish.
Cassady left an indelible mark on the world of the 1950s and 1960s, through his documented adventures in the works of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and their friends. He also turned up in Kesey's writings about the Merry Pranksters. He inspired later bohemian characters, like Jim Morrison of The Doors. People today still read about his life and times, and wish they were able to meet Cassady, or make friends with him. The people who knew Cassady remembered him fondly later, even if he let them down personally, because he was such a unique (special) person. People loved watching Cassady live his life to the fullest, while he encouraged them to do the same with theirs.
Neal Cassady: Behind the Myth (official site)
   | Neal Cassady - Literary Kicks : Neal Cassady |
| | Joan Anderson letter - Joan Anderson" letter |
| | Photos, Neal Cassady Sr. Gravesite - "Old Dean Moriarty" Found, Gravesite Photo Gallery by Paul Verizzo at pbase.com |
| | Denver Beat Photo Tour, Cassady Haunts and Homes, More - DENVER BEAT TOUR Photo Gallery by Paul Verizzo at pbase.com |
| | A list of recordings relating to Kerouac and Cassady - DHARMA beat - Kerouac Korner, talking about things Jack Kerouac by Dave Moore |
| | Cassady Pages - tomchristopher.com: a supplier of art and leisure. |
| | Neal Cassady - Neal Cassady, the official site, to keep alive the beat inspiration of the man and the myth |
| | The Beat Museum - Kerouac.com - The source for all your Beat Generation needs. |
| | "The Last Time I Committed Suicide" - The Last Time I Committed Suicide (1997) |
| | retrieved 4 August 2007 - The Other One | Grateful Dead |
| | retrieved 23 August 2007 - The Annotated "That's It For The Other One" |
| | IMDB title - Luz del mundo (2007) |
| | Video of Cassady, with Ginsberg and Anne Murphy, at City Lights, San Francisco, July 1965 - YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. |
| | Black Spring Press - Welcome to Black Spring Press |
| | Blue Neon Alley - Neal Cassady directory - Neonalley.com - neon signs Resources and Information. This website is for sale! |
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