Issue #0

Off the Road

Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg

Plot

Off the Road tells the intimate story of two of the most famous, and yet enigmatic, figures in modern literature - Jack Kerouac and his friend, travelling companion and hero, Neal Cassady. Written by the woman who loved them both - as wife of Cassady, lover of Kerouac - it is the remarkable record of marriage to the man whose exploits, as Dean Moriarty in On the Road, caught the imagination of a generation and fired the Beat movement. Carolyn Cassady's book spans one of the most vital areas in twentieth-century literature and culture. It begins in the early days of Kerouac and Cassady's friendship, when the former was a struggling author trying to make his way with his first novel, and goes on to the explosive success of On the Road and Ginsberg's Howl, the flowering of the 'Beat generation', and the social revolution of the 1960s which saw Kerouac and Cassady - by then famed as driver of Ken Kesey's legendary Merry Pranksters 'bus' taken up as founding fathers of the emerging worldwide hippy movement.