''Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg'' is an autobiographical

book A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical ...

Carolyn Cassady Carolyn Elizabeth Robinson Cassady (April 28, 1923 – September 20, 2013) was an American writer and associated with the Beat Generation through her marriage to Neal Cassady and her friendships with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and other promin ...

. Originally published in 1990 as ''Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg'', it was republished by London's

Black Spring Press Black Spring Press is an independent English publishing house founded in the early 1980s. The first Black Spring publication was a reprint of Anais Nin's ''D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study'', which on its first publication in 1932 had been ...

, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of

Jack Kerouac Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac (; March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Of French-Canadian an ...

's ''

On the Road ''On the Road'' is a 1957 novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across the United States. It is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations, with its protagonis ...

''. ''Off the Road'' recounts the history of

, wife of Jack Kerouac's traveling companion and ''On the Road''s hero

Neal Cassady Neal Leon Cassady (February 8, 1926 – February 4, 1968) was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic and counterculture movements of the 1960s. He was prominently featured as himself in the "scroll" (first d ...

. As Neal's wife and Kerouac's intermittent lover, Carolyn Cassady was well situated to record the inception of the

Beat Generation The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Genera ...

and its influence on American culture. ''Off the Road'' begins in the initial stages of Kerouac and Neal Cassady's friendship, when Kerouac was a struggling author trying to publish his first novel (1950's '' The Town and the City''), and documents important moments in the beat movement such as the success of ''On the Road'' and

Allen Ginsberg Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Gener ...

's " Howl."

Publication history

*1990, UK,

, 436 pp, hardcover, *1990, USA, William Morrow, 436 pp, hardcover, *1991, UK,

Penguin Penguins (order Sphenisciformes , family Spheniscidae ) are a group of aquatic flightless birds. They live almost exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere: only one species, the Galápagos penguin, is found north of the Equator. Highly adap ...

. 1 August 1991, 464 pp, paperback, *2007, UK,

, 12 July 2007, 448 pp, paperback,

References

*Darlington, Andy. "Carolyn Cassady: On and Off the Road." ''Moody Street Irregulars: A Jack Kerouac Magazine'' 24-26 (1991), 13-18.

External links

Interview with Carolyn Cassady on ''American Legends''

Interview with Carolyn Cassady on BBC website
(not longer available)

Victoria Mixon's Interviews with Carolyn Cassady
{{Allen Ginsberg Books about the Beat Generation 2007 non-fiction books On the Road Jack Kerouac

Publication history

See also

References

External links