Here is the biography of Neal Cassady:
Neal Cassady was born on February 8, 1926, in the back of a car, according to his own fanciful musings. He became famous as Dean Moriarty, the character Jack Kerouac based on him in his seminal 1957 novel "On the Road". Cassady was a free spirit with boundless energy and enthusiasm, and went down in literary history as a symbol of the wandering pioneer-spirit of America.
Born poor in Salt Lake City, his mother died when he was a child and he was raised by an alcoholic father on Denver's skid row. Cassady served many stints in reform school for car theft, claiming to have stolen 500 cars by the time he was 18. He met Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg in 1946 through mutual friend Hal Chase, who was from Colorado and told them stories of this remarkable Westerner from Denver.
Cassady forged friendships with Kerouac and Ginsberg, with his relationship with Kerouac resembling that of a surrogate brother. Cassady was a major catalyst for the Beat Movement, influencing the spontaneous poetics of Kerouac and Ginsberg through the famous "Joan Anderson letter" written by Neal to Jack in December 1950.
Cassady married the middle-class former art student Carolyn Robinson in 1948. They had three children and lived near San Jose, California, where Neal worked as a brakeman. Kerouac often visited their first home, and became part of a menage a trois by bedding Carolyn with Neal's approval.
Attracted to psychologically damaged women who could be controlled, Cassady would try to foist them off on Kerouac, a mother-obsessed alcholic suffering from an Oedipal complex. One of Neal's girlfriends committed suicide, while another wound up in a madhouse.
In 1958, Cassady was arrested for selling marijuana to an undercover narcotics agent in a San Francisco night club and sentenced to 10 years in San Quentin Prison. Kerouac felt guilty for Cassady's notoriety, which had made him known to narcotics cops in San Francisco.
Cassady's second bout with fame came through Ken Kesey, who had been hailed as a sort of successor to Kerouac. The two met during the summer of 1962, and Neal eventually became one of Kesey's hangers-on, the Merry Pranksters, serving as the driver of Kesey's psychedelic-painted school-bus called "Furthur".
After being an icon of the Beat Generation, a decade later, Neal became an icon of the psychedelic scene in California in the 1960s, becoming close to such counter-cultural idols as The Grateful Dead.
Neal Cassady never lived to see 1969. He died sometime on the night of February 3/4, 1968, after attending a wedding party in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. He was found passed out on the railroad track, and died a few hours later.
