Neal Cassady was an inspiration for writers of the Beat Generation and embedded himself in U.S. history by taking part in major Beat, psychedelic and counterculture movements of the 1950s-1960s. Cassady gained some notoriety after Jack Kerouac based his character, Dean Moriarty, on him in his famous novel On The Road. Cassady later became known as the driver of “Furthur”—the bus that carried Ken Kesey and his “Merry Band of Pranksters” across the U.S. following the release of Kesey’s book One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1962.
Cassady was charismatic and many were drawn in by his constant energy and comedic antics while others were quickly scared off. He talked continuously and entertained everyone around him. The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia described him as the world’s greatest comedian and called his output incredible, saying, “He was an artist and he was the art, also.”
Naturally, Cassady was born in a car on the side of the road in Salt Lake City, Utah on February 8, 1926. Following the death of his mother when he was 10 years old, he was raised in Denver, Colorado by his alcoholic father. Though he was an intelligent child he became involved in petty crime at a young age and was arrested for shoplifting and car theft from 14 to 15 years of age. He served 11 months of a one-year sentence after he was arrested for possession of stolen goods in 1944.
Upon his release in 1945, he married 16-year-old Lu Anne Henderson and the two made their way to New York the following year. This is where Cassady met Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg and other prominent figures of the Beat Generation while visiting a mutual friend at Columbia University. He urged Kerouac to teach him how to write fiction and ended up making several trips across the country with both Kerouac and poet, Allen Ginsburg. These trips are what eventually inspired Kerouac’s famous novel On The Road, in which Cassady was represented as Dean Moriarty. Kerouac directly refers to the character as Neal Cassady in the original version of the novel which he frantically typed out on a 120-foot scroll over the course of three weeks.
On The Road was published in 1957 and covered many of the subjects that defined the post-war Beat Generation including jazz, poetry and drugs. Kerouac ditched his early versions of the novel after gaining inspiration from a roughly 16,000-word letter sent by Cassady who often exchanged spontaneous and detailed letters with people he was close to. Kerouac was amazed by the stream of conscious style in the letter which he and Neal referred to as the “Joan Anderson Letter.” Kerouac said, “It was the greatest piece of writing I ever saw, better’n anybody in America, or at least enough to make Melville, Twain, Dreiser, Wolfe, I dunno who, spin in their graves.”
The first sentence of Cassady’s letter to Kerouac reads, “Dear Jack, To hell with the dirty lousy shit, I’ve had enough horseshit. I got my own pure little bangtail mind and the confines of its binding please me yet.”
Though Cassady has been described as the “Soul of the Beat Generation” his influence and antics continued into the 60’s when he became the driver of Ken Kesey’s famous International Harvester school bus which Kesey initially purchased to travel from his home in La Honda, California to New York City to attend a publication party for his second novel Sometimes a Great Notion in 1964. Kesey invited a group of friends for the trip—which was partly inspired by Kerouac’s On The Road, along with Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Kesey and his pranksters are sometimes referred to as the link between the Beat movement and the hippies. They were possibly the first major “hippie group.”
The trip began with Kesey’s station wagon but eventually required a bus after a growing number of “Pranksters” volunteered to join the mayhem. The group would often take LSD and other drugs in an attempt to expand their mind and reach their intended destination—Furthur. Cassady became the main driver of the bus and the following adventures of the Merry Pranksters were most notably featured in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test which documents the drug-fuelled counterculture antics that they attracted along their way.
Kesey funded the trip with earnings from his famous first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and along with the Pranksters, he equipped the bus with an open platform on the roof with seats and railings, an internal/external intercom, a kitchen, bathroom and bunks. The bus was named Furthur by artist Roy Sebern and was painted in an array of colours by the Pranksters. Kesey and the Pranksters allegedly introduced the Hell’s Angels to LSD and threw several parties focused around the drug.
As driver of the bus, Cassady was famous for seemingly focusing on everything but the road which prompted many not to ride with him a second time. He was constantly talking to anyone who would listen while fumbling to roll a joint or tune the radio. Jerry Garcia described driving with him as the “ultimate fear experience” adding, “You knew you were gonna die and there was no question about it.” Ken Kesey recounted an incident in which Cassady left the driver’s seat to get a drink after asking the others several times to no avail. The bus swerved to the side of the road and Cassady fell back into the driver’s seat pulling the thing back onto the road. Cassady was somehow never involved in any major accident.
After the bus made it to New York, Cassady and the others continued their travels and attended Woodstock in 1969. In the following years, Cassady traveled through the states, often dipping into Mexico from time to time as he couldn’t manage to stay in one place for long. By that point, Cassady had five children and would sometimes feel regret about the life he had chosen—feeling he had failed people close to him. When speaking to a young man shortly before his death, Cassady reportedly said, “Twenty years of fast living—there’s just not much left, and my kids are all screwed up. Don’t do what I have done.”
In 1968, Cassady attended a party in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico on a cold rainy night. He left by himself in a T-shirt and jeans and attempted to walk 15 miles along the railroad tracks to the next town. He was later found in a coma by a man who carried him to a local post office building. Cassady died shortly after being taken to the hospital on Feb 4—a few days short of his 42nd birthday. The cause of his death is still unknown as his autopsy merely read, “general congestion in all systems.”
In a letter to a student about his book On The Road, Kerouac wrote, “Dean and I embarked on a journey through post-Whitman America to FIND that America and to FIND the inherent goodness in American man. It was really a story about 2 Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him.”