This week marks both the birth and death of Neal Cassady

By Jack Brummet, Counterculture Ed.

It is the anniversary of Neal Cassady's birth and death this week.  Most articles talk about him being the basis for Dean Moriarty is Kerouac's On The Road. That's true. But Neal Cassady's writing style strongly influenced Kerouac and even caused him to abandon his Thomas Wolfe-style expansive prose for his more rollicking and open ended style of writing. Check out Neal's wonderful, sad, and insane autobiography The First Third (which includes a selection of the letters that caused Kerouac to adopt his "spontaneous prosody"). 

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