Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #673466 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Neal Cassady's wild life has been unreliably chronicled many times, most famously by Jack Kerouac, who portrayed him as the mythically restless Dean Moriarity in On the Road. The primary goal of this new biography is to separate the facts of Cassady's life from the various legends that surround it. Thus, the narrative begins with numerous true and fabricated versions of its subject's birth, after which it diligently pursues the facts behind Cassady's often exaggerated road trips and sexual encounters. While a great deal of the book recounts Cassady's influential friendships with Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, the character who is most vividly and sympathetically brought to life is Carolyn Cassady, Neal's wife for 20 years. Carolyn served as his rarely heeded conscience, and her presence in the tale repeatedly reminds the reader of the consequences of Neal's selfish and destructive activities. The story clips along steadily and the prose is consistently sharp, but Sandison (Jack Kerouac), who died in 2004, and Vickers (21st-Century Hotel) offer scant analysis of Cassady's character. The authors do have a strong sense of movement and scope, however, which renders this a crucial tool in understanding the life, if not the mind, of Neal Cassady. 16 b&w photos. (Sept.)
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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

Review

Customer Reviews

A Good Biography
This book is for fans of Beat Writers....or those interested in Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. This is a comprehensive and well researched and written biography on Neal Cassady, a buddy and inspiration to Jack Kerouac. ( Neal was Dean Moriarity in On the Road) as well as the driver on Kesey's bus trip to New York and a key figure in Kesey's Merry Pranksters. The authors' make the point ( which Kerouac also espoused) that Neal's ecstatic and uncensored letter writing style greatly influenced Kerouac's switch to spontaneous writing following his publication of The Town and the City (Kerouac's first Wolfian styled book) and resulted in what eventually became On the Road....with Kerouac's and Cassady's adventures being the central part of the book. Neal, at Jack's urging to be a writer, struggled to be a writer of novels and of consequence...but outside of letters, some quite long, and a book titled the First Third, nothing ever great came from Neal's writing. So he served as an inspiration to Kerouac and those he encountered especially Kesey..Neal's great myth was based on his amazing mind and his physical presence in the world. His was a high energy and at times a tortured life. This book seems like a balanced telling of Neal's life and is consistent with some of the people who I have interviewed who knew Neal...I could question a couple minor points but they really don't belong in this general review nor are critical to the overall thrust of the book....It's amazing this book was completed by two authors, one dying before the book was completed, because the writing style remains consistent through out. If this is a topic area you are interested in, this is a book worth reading...well done.

Demythologizing the Myth
A comprehensive portrait of a Beat Generation Legend that attempts to demythologize the cornucopia of myths swirling around Neal Cassady. However, his life makes such an interesting read that it remains mythological.