Neal Leon Cassady was born on February 8, 1926. He was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic and counterculture movements of the 1960s.
He was prominently featured as himself in the “scroll” (first draft) version of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road and served as the model for the character Dean Moriarty in the 1957 version of that book. In many of Kerouac’s later books, Cassady is represented by the character Cody Pomeray. Cassady also appeared in Allen Ginsberg’s poems, and in several other works of literature by other writers.
Cassady is credited with helping Kerouac break with his Thomas Wolfe-influenced sentimental style, as seen in The Town and the City (1950). After reading Cassady’s letters, Kerouac was inspired to write his story in Cassady’s communication style: “…in a rush of mad ecstasy, without self-consciousness or mental hesitation”.
This fluid writing style, reading more like a stream of consciousness or hypermanic rapid-fire conversation than written prose, is best demonstrated within Cassady’s letters to family and friends. In a letter to Kerouac from 1953, Cassady begins with the following fervent sentence; Well it’s about time you wrote, I was fearing you farted out on top that mean mountain or slid under while pissing in Pismo, beach of flowers, food and foolishness, but I knew the fear was ill-founded for balancing it in my thoughts of you, much stronger and valid if you weren’t dead, was a realization of the experiences you would be having down there, rail, home, and the most important, climate, by a remembrance of my own feelings and thoughts (former low, or more exactly, nostalgic and unreal; latter hi) as, for example, I too seemed to spend time looking out upper floor windows at sparse, especially night times, traffic in females—old or young.
On the Road became a sensation. By capturing Cassady’s voice, Kerouac discovered a unique style of his own that he called “spontaneous prose,” a stream of consciousness prose form.
Cassady’s own written work was never formally published in his lifetime, and he left behind only a half-written manuscript and a number of personal letters. Cassady admitted to Kerouac in a letter from 1948, “My prose has no individual style as such, but is rather an unspoken and still unexpressed groping toward the personal. There is something there that wants to come out; something of my own that must be said. Yet, perhaps, words are not the way for me."