American writer with a staccato style, a beatnik and forerunner of the hippie movement.
Cassady grew up during the poverty of the Depression. When he was six his parents separated and he moved to a condemned building with his dad, a meek, guilt-ridden alcoholic. He was a hard worker as a brakeman for the railroad for ten years, a laborer at the Los Gatos Tire Company, and an auto mechanic. His unfinished autobiography was published posthumously as “The First Third.”
His education was primarily in reform school, stealing the first of some 500 cars at 14, getting off on the rush of danger. He had a gift of gab and bi-sexual electricity. After getting out of jail he married a 15-year-old runaway, LuAnne, briefly before he met and married Caroline Casey with whom he had three kids and spent most of his adult life.
After a friend introduced him to Jack Kerouac, they became close pals and he was accepted into Kerouac’s intellectual campus crowd as a colorful addition. He was married to Caroline when Jack Kerouac moved into the attic in 1952; the three became a m‚nage a trois. He was the model for Kerouac’s later character “Dean Moriarty” in his “On the Road,” published September 1957.
Cassady spent two years in prison for giving a cop a joint in 1958. He spent the next decade as a rootless wanderer, turning up in the ’60s as one of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and the driver of the famed psychedelic bus.
He died at 42 of pneumonia from exposure in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico 2/04/1968, his body found beside the railroad tracks.
Link to Wikipedia biography