Name/Title
Cassady, NealEntry/Object ID
PE108Description
Neal Cassady (1926 - 1968), at right, is shown in 1949 while employed as a brakeman for the Southern Pacific Railroad. In August, 1954, Neal and Carolyn Cassady purchased a ranch house on Bancroft Avenue, "in the middle of prune orchards, yet only a mile from Los Gatos village." Neal Cassady, at the center of the Beat Generation, appears as a main character in many books, most famously as the irrepressible "Dean Moriarty" in Jack Kerouac's "On the Road." Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti were frequent visitors to the Cassady home. In 1958, Cassady was sentenced to San Quentin Prison for selling marijuana. In her autobiography, Carolyn Robinson Cassady, who was Neal's second wife, expressed gratitude for the support she and the three Cassady children received from the community after Neal's arrest, and for sympathetic reporting by Sam Hanson, who wrote for the Los Gatos Times-Observer. After his release from prison in 1960, Cassady worked at the Los Gatos Tire Company. A brilliant but tormented man, often involved with drugs, Neal Cassady died of unknown causes in Mexico, recalling the death of Ambrose Bierce more than 50 years earlier. PE108Collection
PeopleDimensions
Height
13.74 cmWidth
11.68 cmLocation
* Untyped Location
John Baggerly Collection - Los Gatos Weekly TimesCopyright
Notes
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