Neal Cassady & Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
Neal Cassady - Famous 'Beat' and road partner of Jack Kerouac arrested in 1958 after selling two joints to undercover agents.
source: High Times
Jack Kerouac - In 1939 he graduated from high school, smoked marijuana for the first time, and paid money to lose his virginity.
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His imagination fueled by Ginsberg and Burroughs - and two other new companions, marijuana and benzedrine - Kerouac began writing his first novel. He typed like the athlete he still was: one hundred words a minute in marathon all-night sessions
source: Culture Wars
Neal Cassady - Although his name is unrecognizable to many, Neal Cassady is one of those rare individuals whose existence changed the culture of a nation. In fact he was such an integral part of the cultural revolution birthed with the Beats and set ablaze by the Hippies that Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead was to later describe Cassady as “a tool of the cosmos.” Born February 8, 1926, Neal Cassady entered this world the way he would one day be immortalized – on a road trip. He was born by the side of the road, in Salt Lake City Utah, a quick stop over on his family's journey to Hollywood in search of better prospects. Some 20 years later, a series of road trips with writer Jack Kerouac would more fully birth his place in history.
Jack Kerouac is typically remembered as the author of On the Road, the quintessential Beat Generation novel. Like most of Kerouac's work, it was autobiographical, drawn from his own life experience and given rhythm and color by the personalities and adventures he'd experienced along the way. Unlike in his first novel, The Town and the City, (in which Kerouac had invented elaborate characters and plots, only loosely inspired by real life events), when he finally sat down to create the published version of On The Road, Kerouac decided to thoroughly immerse the reader in the real events and characters he'd experienced exploring the highways and alleys of America with pal Neal Cassady. This concept of simply putting the grit of real life down as fiction was one he borrowed from writer friend John Clellon Holmes. But the style of On the Road was pure Jack -- or depending on how you look at it, pure Neal Cassady. For it was the careening, confessional, jazz-like prose of letters received from Cassady that Jack adapted for writing On the Road.
Jack had met Cassady through mutual friends at Columbia University. Jack had come to Columbia on a football scholarship, but had dropped out at the start of his second year. It had been a generally rough period in his life. His parents' finances had just gone to hell and his father was retreating into alcoholism. Meanwhile Jack was flunking out, had been seriously injured in a game, and had huge fight with his coach. It was classic Jack to play the injured, angry bear and tell everyone to go to hell. Off he went to join the Navy. But he soon found himself ill-suited to the service, and feigned insanity to get discharged. In 1944 he was back in New York, sponging off girlfriend Edie Parker and meeting Columbia students Lucien Carr, Allen Ginsberg and a smooth, worldly-wise Harvard Grad named William S. Burroughs.
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