Biografía

Usually referred to as "Dean Moriarty" or "Cody Pomeray" in Kerouac's (autobiographical) novels, while Allen Ginsberg referred to him as "N.C., secret hero of these poems" in his landmark "Howl" (titled by Kerouac) and other works.

Got acquainted with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg in the mid-1940s (shortly after he got out of jail, and married the teenaged LuAnne), when he asked their help in "learning to write". More time was spent hustling Kerouac and his mother for food and drinks, and carrying on an affair with Ginsberg, than in his learning the art of writing, but it all seemed to pay off in the end; each became a legend in part through their relationship.

Claimed to have literally been born "on the road", in the back of a car while his parents were traveling. Much of his "upbringing" came in pool halls and troubled-youth homes (or jail) around the Denver CO area; his mother wasn't around much after his birth, and his father only a little more.

Was arrested for selling marijuana and sentenced to 10 years in San Quentin Prison in 1958. His friend (and some-time lover of Cassady's second wife Carolyn) Jack Kerouac, who had made him famous by writing of him as Dean Moriarity in "On the Road", felt guilty as he felt Neal's notoriety had made him none to narcotics cops in San Francisco. Actually, Cassady did little to disguise the fact that he was dealing, at one point boasting to friends of having given a narc two joints in a North Beach nitery. On their part, the narcotics police though Neal was part of a ring that was using the railroads to smuggle massive quantities of pot into the U.S., a charge that was never proven. He was released in 1960.

On Saturday, February 3, 1968 Cassady met up with a wedding party in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and was invited to party. Although he was taking Seconals (the brand name for secobarbital, a barbiturate), he drank pulque, a fermented alcoholic drink made from the maguey plant (an agave known as the "century plant"), before wandering off at night. Alcohol and barbiturates are often a fatal combination, and as Neal walked on the railroad tracks to reach the next town, he passed out in the cold and rainy night wearing nothing but a T-shirt and jeans. In the morning he was found in a coma by the track and brought to the closest hospital, where he died a few hours later. He was 41 years old.