Neal Cassady: The Fast Life of a Beat Hero

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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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
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