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Neal Cassady ( February 8 , 1926 – February 4 , 1968 ) was an icon of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic movement of the 1960s, perhaps best known as the inspiration for the character of Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac Born in Salt Lake City and raised by an alcoholic father in Denver , Cassady spent much of his youth bouncing between skid-row hotels with his father and Reform School s for car theft. In 1946 Cassady met Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg at Columbia University in New York and quickly became friends with them and the circle of artists and writers there. He had a sexual relationship with Ginsberg that lasted off and on for the next twenty years, and he later traveled cross-country with Kerouac. Cassady proved to be the catalyst for the Beat Movement, appearing as the characters Dean Moriarty and Cody Pomeray in many of Kerouac's novels. Ginsberg mentioned him as well in his ground-breaking poem, '' Howl '' ("N.C., secret hero of these poems..."). Additionally, he is commonly credited for helping Kerouac break ties with his Thomas Wolfe -inspired sentimental style and discover his own unique voice through "spontaneous prose", a Stream Of Consciousness approach to writing. In 1948, Cassady married Carolyn Robinson . The couple eventually had three children and settled down in a Monte Sereno ranch house, 50 miles south of San Francisco , California , where Kerouac and Ginsberg sometimes visited. Cassady worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad and kept in touch with his Beat counterparts even as they drifted apart philosophically. Cassady served time for possession of marijuana during the late 1950's and Carolyn divorced him in 1963. In 1964, Cassady met up with Ken Kesey , becoming part of the Merry Pranksters and serving as the crazed driver of the bus Furthur , which was immortalized in Tom Wolfe 's book, '' The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test ''. He later played a prominent role in the California psychedelic scene of the 1960s . Cassady makes an appearance in , an event also chronicled in ''The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test''. Although his name was removed at the insistence of Thompson's publisher, the description is clearly a reference to Cassady's appearances in Jack Kerouac's works, ''On the Road'' and ''Visions of Cody''. In January, 1968, Cassady traveled to Mexico with fellow prankster George "Barely Visible" Walker and longtime girlfriend Annie Murphy. Holding court at a beachside house just south of Puerto Vallarta , they were joined by Berkeley folk, Barbara Wilson and Walter Cox . All-night storytelling, speed runs in George's psychedelic Lotus Elan and plenty of Acid for everyone made for a classic Cassady performance--"like a trained bear," Carolyn Cassady once said. At one point Cassady took Walter, then 20, aside and told him, "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." After a party in San Miguel De Allende , Mexico in early February, 1968, Cassady went walking by a railroad track to reach the next town, but passed out in the cold and rainy night wearing nothing but a T-shirt and jeans. In the morning he was found in a Coma by the track and brought to the closest hospital, where he died a few hours later. He was 41. Kesey retells the story of his death in a Short Story named ''The Day After Superman Died'' (in his collected short stories published as ''Demon Box''), where Cassady is quoted mumbling the number of nails he had counted in the rail (sixty-four thousand nine-hundred and twenty-eight) as his last words before dying. Cassady lived briefly with the Grateful Dead and is immortalised in the Dead song "That's It For the Other One." The title of another Dead tune, "Cassidy," might seem to be a misspelling of Cassady's name; in fact the song primarily celebrates the 1970 birth of baby girl Cassidy Law into the Grateful Dead family, though the lyrics also include references to Neal Cassady himself. The film ''The Last Time I Committed Suicide'' (1997) is based on the " Joan Anderson letter " written by Cassady to Jack Kerouac. Neal Cassady was never published during his lifetime and never earned anything for his seminal role in the Beat Movement and the California psychedelic scene. His autobiography ''The First Third'' was published Posthumously . APPEARANCES IN LITERATURE
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