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Neal Cassady: The Fast Life of a Beat Hero
Author(s): David Sandison (Author), Graham Vickers (Author)
- Publisher: Chicago Review Press
- Publication Date: September 1, 2006
- Edition: First Edition
- Language: English
- Print length: 340 pages
- ISBN-10: 1556526156
- ISBN-13: 9781556526152
Book Description
This fascinating and in-depth biography of Neal Cassady takes a look at the man who achieved immortality as Dean Moriarty, the central character in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. A charismatic, funny, articulate, and formidably intelligent man, Cassady was also a compulsive womanizer who lived life on the edge. His naturalistic, conversational writing style inspired Kerouac, who lifted a number of passages verbatim and uncredited from Cassady’s letters for significant episodes in On the Road. Drawing on a wealth of new research and with full cooperation from central figures in his lifeincluding Carolyn Cassady and Ken Keseythis account captures Cassady’s unique blend of inspired lunacy and deep spirituality.
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
Beat icon Neal Cassady is remembered for his devastating good looks, daredevil ways, sexual voraciousness, casual cruelty, and “creative unruliness.” He was a god of freedom and hedonism to the writers who forged the Cassady myth, primary among them Allen Ginsberg, who was overtly in love with the expediently bisexual wanderer, and Jack Kerouac, who loved Cassady in theory and Cassady’s remarkable wife, Carolyn, in practice. Beat enthusiasts know the basics, but biographer Sandison, who passed away while working on this definitive portrait, and Vickers, who so ably completed it, provide a swarm of freshly stinging facts and newly minted reminiscences via extensive interviews that reveal Cassady’s rampaging 41 years in full. Growing up rough in Depression-era Denver, Cassady’s conquests and crimes were legion, his hungers insatiable. He became a “charismatic sociopath” with “priapic magnetism” and an onerous lack of empathy. From his legendary cross-country escapades and high-velocity letters and rants to prison terms, a stint with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and early death, Cassady blazes across these midnight pages like a falling meteorite. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Sexy, primal, pot-dealing, speed-rapping Cassady emerges from these pages as a fire-breathing Western rover, eternally on the road.” Stephen Davis, author, Bob Marley, Hammer of the Gods, and Jim Morrison
“A myth-shattering account of one of the most important figures of the beat generation.” Paul Maher, author,
Kerouac: The Definitive Biography“This memorial to Neal Cassady, done with the assistance of Neal’s wife Carolyn, will probably remain the gold standard.”
Stanley Booth, author, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones“The authors . . . do an excellent job in putting the reader in the passenger car.”
Four Magazine“A full-scale biography of the maddest of the ‘mad ones.'”
The New York Times (City Edition)
