Kirjahaku

"Dave Moore's work on this collection is simply awesome.... It should become and remain the definitive reference book for Beat scholars forever." --Carolyn CassadyNeal Cassady is best remembered today as Jack Kerouac's muse and the basis for the character "Dean Moriarty" in Kerouac's classic On The Road, and as one of Ken Kesey's merriest of Merry Pranksters, the driver of the psychedelic bus "Further," immortalized in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. This collection brings together more than two hundred letters to Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes, and other Beat generation luminaries, as well as correspondence between Neal and his wife, Carolyn. These amazing letters cover Cassady's life between the ages of 18 and 41 and finish just months before his death in February 1968. Brilliantly edited by Dave Moore, this unique collection presents the "Soul of the Beat Generation" in his own words--sometimes touching and tender, sometimes bawdy and hilarious. Here is the real Neal Cassady--raw and uncut.

Immortalized as Dean Moriarty by Jack Kerouac in his epic novel, On the Road, Neal Cassady was infamous for his unstoppable energy and his overwhelming charm, his savvy hustle and his devil-may-care attitude. A treasured friend and traveling companion of Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Ken Kesey, to name just some of his cohorts on the beatnik path, Cassady lived life to the fullest, ready for inspiration at any turn. Before he died in Mexico in 1968, just four days shy of his forty-second birthday, Cassady had written the jacket blurb for this book: "Seldom has there been a story of a man so balled up. No doubt many readers will not believe the veracity of the author, but I assure these doubting Thomases that every incident, as such, is true." As Ferlinghetti writes in his editor's note, Cassady was "an early prototype of the urban cowboy who a hundred years ago might have been an outlaw on the range." Here are his autobiographical writings, the rambling American saga of a truly free individual. Neal Cassady (1926-1968) was a key figure and writer during the Beat Generation and is known as the inspiration for Jack Kerouac's immortalizing character Dean Moriarty. In 1946, Cassady traveled to New York City where he met famous Beat poets and writers such as Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg. Cassady's works were never published during his lifetime.

This incredibly illusive artefact, which describes in explicit detail his relationship with Joan Anderson had been missing for 60 years when it was discovered in an attic in Oakland, USA, in 2014. Legal machinations over its ownership ensued and it has not been published in its entirety...until now.

A letter from Neal Cassady to his best friend and travelling companion Jack (On the Road) Kerouac. Kerouac received the letter from Cassady in 1950 and later told the Paris Review that it had inspired ‘On the Road’ along with his new literary style; referring to it as ‘the greatest piece of writing I ever saw’. The energy of Cassady’s fast-paced, free-flowing, confessional prose pulsates through the 15,000 word missive; bringing gloriously to life the personality of one of the most high profile figures in literary, and Beat movement, history. This incredibly illusive artefact, which describes in explicit detail his relationship with Joan Anderson (‘a perfect beauty of loveliness that I forgot everything else’), had been missing for 60 years when it was discovered in an attic in Oakland, USA, in 2014. Legal machinations over its ownership ensued and it has not been published in its entirety...until now. This much-anticipated letter is now reproduced in full, with an introduction by Beat scholar Professor A. Robert Lee. This jewel of Beat history also includes a range of photographs of the writers and a rare sepia drawing of Neal by his former wife, writer and artist Carolyn Cassady.