Off the Road: My Years With Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg

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About Off The Road: My Years With Cassady, Kerouac, And

Product Description The wife of Neal Cassady describes her life in the American Beat subculture, her marriage to Cassady and love affair with Jack Kerouac, and her relationship with Allen Ginsberg From Publishers Weekly In flesh, and as portrayed in Jack Kerouac's novels On the Road (as Dean Moriarty) and Big Sur (as Cody Pomeroy), Neal Cassady embodied the zeitgeist of his generation, among whom was the author, his wife of 15 chaotic years. He was 22, three years her junior, when she married Cassady in 1948 and became handmaiden to a passionately devoted brotherhood: her husband, her extramarital lover Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, all, as Kerouc put it, " . . . in the car heading for the world unknown." So hazardous proved the terrain that Cassady died at age 43; Kerouac the following year, at 47. Of the famed Beat trio, only Ginsberg would claim his place as elder statesman, his survivorship forecast in his letters to Cassady: "It ain't right to take on so paranoiac just to challenge and see how far you can go"; "I feel so evil when I not agree in blindness." How hard Cassady, possessed of "humid magnetism" and "dangerous glamour," traveled is a tale of self-destruction recreated with felt tragedy by a wife who yearned for conventional family life, to raise their three children in suburban security on the San Francisco peninsula, to be assured that her railway brakeman husband would bring home a weekly paycheck. But compulsive infidelity, drugs, spells in prison, horse-race gambling and the road kept the well-intentioned Cassady otherwise engaged. Among legendary Beats who pass through these memoirs are Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, along with others who left an indelible impress on the lives of the Cassadys: Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, an astrologer, a cult of clairvoyants. To the familiar history of the Beat Generation, Carolyn Cassady adds a proprietary chapter marked with newness, self-exposure, love and poignancy. Photos not seen by PW . (July) . Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Neal Cassady has been the subject of several novels, poems, and songs, but he is probably still best known as Dean Moriarty in Kerouac's On the Road . This biography is an expanded, more detailed, far superior version of Carolyn Cassady's Heart Beat ( LJ 9/15/76), the memoir that served as the basis for John Byrum's 1980 film of the same name. Cassady is more expansive here. She describes the complex, intense relationships that developed between her husband, Kerouac, and Ginsberg, and she analyzes their effects on her marriage. Her writing is sincere and engaging, full of pain and struggle but also love. Highly recommended. - William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.