"Dave Moore's work on this collection is simply awesome.... It should become and remain the definitive reference book for Beat scholars forever." --Carolyn Cassady

Neal 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...

All the components of the Jack Kerouac legend are here: the excesses of alcohol and drugs; the soul searching; the charactersNeal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Lucien Carr, John Clellon Holmes and William Burroughs, Jack's mother, Gabrielle, and the other women in Kerouac's life. There is also a record of the travels that became the basis for On the Road and Visions of Cody, the death-shrouded childhood that became Mexico City Blues and Tristessa, and the stupor of fame that weighed on him as he tried to articulate his torments in Big Sur. This edition is newly revised with a...

Written by the woman who loved them all--as wife of Cassady, lover of Kerouac, and friend of Ginsberg--this riveting and intimate memoir spans one of the most vital eras in twentieth-century literature and culture, including the explosive successes of Kerouac's On the Road and Ginsberg's Howl, the flowering of the Beat movement, and the social revolution of the 1960s. Carolyn Cassady reveals a side of Neal Cassady rarely seen-that of husband and father, a man who craved respectability, yet could not resist the thrills of a wilder and ultimately more destructive lifestyle.