Neal Cassady (February 8th 1926 - February 4th 1968) is a character impossible to circumvent of the Beat generation, although it never published the least book.

Protagonist and fellow traveller of Jack Kerouac in On the road , known under the pseudonym of Dean Moriarty, Neal is an enfant terrible. Very quickly delivered to itself because of an alcoholic father, he regularly knew the reformatories without that not starting its side débonnaire. Neal unloaded one day with New York in charming company with for ambition learning the Philosophie near Allen Ginsberg. This last presented it to Jack Kerouac thus forming a delirious trio in which alcohol, Drogue and sex will make good household. Neal has a reputation of driver except par, and it is without encumbers that it will lead Kerouac of Frisco (San Francisco) to New York and conversely energy of the one to the other of these two cities without making the least pause, if is not to fill the tank.

One will find Neal with Ken Kesey later a few years at the wheel of the bus of the Merry Pranksters for a hallucinatory voyage in the America of the Années 1960 into full discovery with the acid , drug with the multiple faces. All this period of its life was reported in the work of Tom Wolfe Acid test .

A few weeks before its death, it met Bukowski, with which it required to write the final chapter, which the latter did by devoting a text in the to him Journal of an old disgusting person .

One found the body of Neal Cassady along a railway with the Mexico, probably died of an cardiac arrest of the continuations of abuse in any kind.

Cassady had begun a Autobiographie, whose only outline could appear in a posthumous way in 1971: The first third (published in French in 1998 under the title the First Youth ). The second woman of Cassady (it was married three times), Carolyn, told her life with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg in On my road .