Neal Cassady: Fastestmanalive
Of course, Jack Kerouac wrote "On the Road"---he lived those adventures and had the talent to get it down on paper. But who inspired "On the Road"? Many of Kerouac's friends did , but mainly one man, Neal Cassady known as "Dean Moriarty" in the book, was a driving force behind those adventures. Cassady, legendary car thief, ladies man, wheel man who could tell amazing true life tales while driving cross country hopped up on life and living it at full speed. Kerouac said he got the idea for his spontaneous prose style from a long lost 20,000 word letter Cassady wrote excitedly telling a story about trying to pick up a woman with various intricate details and tangents. Although Cassady was unpublished in his lifetime, City Lights released a posthumous selection of his writing in 1971 called "The First Third". In the sixties, Cassady became friends with another counterculture writer, Ken Kesey and became the driver of the psychedelic bus which transported the Merry Pranksters on their acid-drenched adventures. Read Tom Wolfe's classic "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" for more details on those trailblazers. Cassady was 44 when he died in Mexico in 1968.
Kerouac, Tom Wolfe, On the Road, Neal Cassady, The First Third, City Lights books, Ken Kesey, Merry Pranksters, Electric Kool Aid Acid Test
apparently Neal Cassady's last words were sixty-four thousand nine-hundred and twenty-eight
he had been walking along the rails, counting the railroad ties as he went along.
I guess his body gave out before his mind did.
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