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. He served as the model for the character Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road.
Cassady was born to Maude Jean Scheuer and Neal Marshall Cassady in Salt Lake City, Utah. 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 1941, the 15-year old Cassady met Justin W. Brierly, a prominent Denver educator. Brierly was well known as a mentor of promising young men, and, impressed by Cassady's intelligence, Brierly took an active role in Cassady's life over the next few years. He helped admit Cassady to East High School where he taught, encouraged and supervised his reading, and found employment for him. Cassady continued his criminal activities, however, and was repeatedly arrested from 1942 to 1944; on at least one of these occasions, he was released by law enforcement into Brierly's safekeeping. In June 1944, Cassady was arrested for receipt of stolen property, and served eleven months of a one-year prison sentence. He and Brierly actively exchanged letters during this period even through Cassady's intermittent incarcerations; these represent Cassady's earliest surviving letters. Brierly, apparently a closeted homosexual, is also believed to have been responsible for Cassady's first homosexual experience.
In October 1945, after being released from prison, he married the fifteen-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 through Hal Chase, another protégé of Justin W. Brierly's. 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. Carolyn Robinson met Cassady in 1946 while she worked in Denver, Colorado, as a teaching assistant. Carolyn originally dated Jack Kerouac and would leave the Beat group shortly after walking in on Neal, Allen Ginsberg and Neal's wife at the time, LuAnne, in bed together. Five weeks after her departure, Neal got an annulment from LuAnne and married Carolyn. Her book, "Off the Road," details her marriage to Cassady and recalls him as "the archetype of the American Man."
After Cassady's marriage to LuAnne Henderson was annulled, Cassady married Carolyn 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. In 1950 he entered into a bigamous marriage with Diane Hansen, with whom he fathered one son, Curtis Hansen. 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.
Cassady had a sexual relationship with Ginsberg which lasted off and on for the next twenty years, and he traveled cross-country with both Kerouac and Ginsberg on multiple occasions.
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 who were vocal proponents of the use of psychedelic drugs. During 1964, he served as the main driver of the bus Further on the iconic first half of the journey from San Francisco to New York, which was immortalized by Tom Wolfe's book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Cassady appears at length in a documentary film about the Merry Pranksters and their cross-country trip, Magic Trip, directed by Alex Gibney, released on 5 August 2011.
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, in 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, reportedly by Dr. Anton Black, later a professor at El Paso Community College, who carried Cassady over his shoulders to the local post office building. Cassady was then transported 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, the physician 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.
"He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only coning because he wanted to so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him." These lines from "On the Road" provide the core reason that so many were overtaken by Neal. Following WWII, the younger generations of America were left to wander the country in search of a purpose. The dropping of the first nuclear bomb made people all over the world, but most significantly those in the United States, acutely aware of how small their existence is in comparison to the rest of the world. It has been argued that this turning point in American history marked the end of the "era of good feelings" and left people grossly unsettled with their superficial suburban lives, from this came the Beats and Neal Cassady.
Neal Cassady was in many ways the poster-child, catalyst, and propellant behind the Beat Generation and in turn, forever impacted American culture. To all who met Neal, there was an undeniable magnetism felt for his unquenchable thirst for life. His appetite for everything was insatiable; he was often described as more of a force of nature rather than a fellow man. Many fell into the spell that Neal seemed to cast upon whichever room he occupied at the present. Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac were all consumed by Neal's brilliantly chaotic, Benzedrine filled ramblings about life, and everything in between. In his novel, "On the Road" the narrator, Sal Paradise (the personification of Jack Kerouac) states to the reader that "Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line, the pearl would be handed to me." The "pearl" that Sal (Kerouac) was searching for was what every Beat was searching for, and for the Beats, Neal Cassidy was the phantom that would lead them to "IT".
^ Sandison, David; Vickers, Graham (2006-11-19). "‘Neal Cassady'". The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-05-20.
^ Cassady & Moore 2004, p. 1.
^ Cassady & Moore 2004, p. 1; Sandison & Vickers 2006, pp. 42–46.
^ Turner 1996, p. 79 ("Brierly had been sexually attracted to Neal, and managed to entice him into his first homosexual experience."); Sandison & Vickers 2006, pp. 41–42 ("Brierly was most likely also a closet homosexual, and it was probably through him that Neal Cassady would first discover and explore gay sex and serve as a hustler in Denver's gay community."). According to some reports, however, Brierly's sexual orientation was an open secret. See Weir, John (June 22, 2005), "Everybody knows, nobody cares, or: Neal Cassady's Penis", TriQuarterly.
^ Ferlinghetti, Lawrence (1990). "Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg". Nation. pp. 652-653.
^ Cassady, Carolyn (1990). Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg. London: Black Spring Press. ISBN 0-948238-05-4.
^ Allen Young, "Allen Ginsberg: the Gay Sunshine Interview," page 1 (Bolinas, California: Grey Fox Press, 1973)
^ Neal Cassidy website (retrieved 26 January 2009)
^ Kerouac, Jack (1976). On The Road. USA: Penguin Group. ISBN 1101127570.
^ Sandison, Vickers, David, Graham (2007). Neal Cassady: The Fast Life of a Beat Hero. Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press. pp. viii.. ISBN 9781556526916.
^ On the Road
^ Paul Maher Jr. Kerouac: The Definitive Biography (Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2004) p. 233 ISBN 0-87833-305-3
^ Knight, Arthur and Kit (1988). Kerouac and the Beats. New York, NY: Paragon House. ISBN 1-55778-067-6.
^ http://www.dead.net/song/other-one, retrieved 4 August 2007
^ http://arts.ucsc.edu/GDead/AGDL/other1.html, retrieved 23 August 2007
^ Cassidy's Tale
^ IMDB title
^ IMDB entry
^ http://www.nealcassadyestate.com/carolyn.html, retrieved 28 August 2007
^ Brooks, Barnes (December 2, 2009). "Sundance Tries to Hone Its Artsy Edge". newyorktimes.com.
^ "Alessandro Nivola is hotter than Audrey Tautou". BlackBookMag.com. Retrieved 2009-09-22.
^
^ "'Love Always, Carolyn". Documentary film. IMDB. Retrieved 9 September 2011.
^ Bignell, Paul; Johnson, Andrew (2007-07-29). "On the Road (uncensored). Discovered: Kerouac 'cuts'". The Independent (London). Retrieved 2010-05-20.
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