Letters written by Cassidy to his family and godfather while serving a sentence for selling marijuana.

“Dave Moore's work on this collection is simply awesome.... It should become and remain the definitive reference book for Beat scholars forever.” —Carolyn Cassady Neal Cassady is best remembered today as Jack Kerouac’s muse and the basis for the character “Dean Moriarty” in Kerouac’s classic On The Road, and as one of Ken Kesey’s merriest of Merry Pranksters, the driver of the psychedelic bus “Further,” immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. This collection brings together more than two hundred letters to Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes, and other Beat generation luminaries, as well as correspondence between Neal and his wife, Carolyn. These amazing letters cover Cassady’s life between the ages of 18 and 41 and finish just months before his death in February 1968. Brilliantly edited by Dave Moore, this unique collection presents the “Soul of the Beat Generation” in his own words—sometimes touching and tender, sometimes bawdy and hilarious. Here is the real Neal Cassady—raw and uncut.

A letter from Neal Cassady to his best friend and travelling companion Jack (On the Road) Kerouac.Kerouac received the letter from Cassady in 1950 and later told the Paris Review that it had inspired 'On theRoad' along with his new literary style; referring to it as 'the greatest piece of writing I ever saw'. The energy ofCassady's fast-paced, free-flowing, confessional prose pulsates through the 15,000 word missive; bringinggloriously to life the personality of one of the most high profile figures in literary, and Beat movement, history.This incredibly illusive artefact, which describes in explicit detail his relationship with Joan Anderson ('aperfect beauty of loveliness that I forgot everything else'), had been missing for 60 years when it was discovered in an attic in Oakland, USA, in 2014. Legal machinations over its ownership ensued and it has not been published in its entirety...until now.This much-anticipated letter is now reproduced in full, with an introduction by Beat scholar ProfessorA. Robert Lee. This jewel of Beat history also includes a range of photographs of the writers and a raresepia drawing of Neal by his former wife, writer and artist Carolyn Cassady.

From the USA TODAY bestselling author of Sweet Thing and Nowhere But Here comes a love story about a Craigslist “missed connection” post that gives two people a second chance at love fifteen years after they were separated in New York City. To the Green-eyed Lovebird: We met fifteen years ago, almost to the day, when I moved my stuff into the NYU dorm room next to yours at Senior House. You called us fast friends. I like to think it was more. We lived on nothing but the excitement of finding ourselves through music (you were obsessed with Jeff Buckley), photography (I couldn’t stop taking pictures of you), hanging out in Washington Square Park, and all the weird things we did to make money. I learned more about myself that year than any other. Yet, somehow, it all fell apart. We lost touch the summer after graduation when I went to South America to work for National Geographic. When I came back, you were gone. A part of me still wonders if I pushed you too hard after the wedding… I didn’t see you again until a month ago. It was a Wednesday. You were rocking back on your heels, balancing on that thick yellow line that runs along the subway platform, waiting for the F train. I didn’t know it was you until it was too late, and then you were gone. Again. You said my name; I saw it on your lips. I tried to will the train to stop, just so I could say hello. After seeing you, all of the youthful feelings and memories came flooding back to me, and now I’ve spent the better part of a month wondering what your life is like. I might be totally out of my mind, but would you like to get a drink with me and catch up on the last decade and a half? M

According to the Pattern is a Christian Romance by Grace Livingston Hill MRS. Claude Winthrop sat in her pretty sitting room alone under the lamplight making buttonholes. Her eyes were swimming in stringing tears that she would not for the world let fall. She felt as if a new law of attraction held them there to blind and torture her. She could not let them fall, for no more were left; they were burned up by the emotions that were raging in her soul, and if these tears were gone her eyeballs would surely scorch the lids. She was exercising strong control over her lips that longed to open in a groan that should increase until it reached a shriek that all the world could hear. Her fingers flew with nervous haste, setting the needle in dainty stitches in the soft white dress for her baby girl. She had not supposed when she fashioned the little garment the day before and laid it aside ready for the finishing that she would think of its wearer to-night in so much agony. Ah, her baby girl, and her boy, and the older sister!

Neal Cassady achieved mythical status when Jack Kerouac turned him into Dean Moriarty, the hero of On The Road. In this major biography David Sandison and Graham Vickers trace the life of the wild man from Denver who galvanised Kerouac and the Beat Generation not by artistic endeavour but by his extravagant life-affirming behaviour and epic feats of cross-country driving. Dead before his forty-second birthday, Cassady was surrounded by legends and tall stories quite literally from birth. This superbly-researched biography at last strips away the mythology to reveal truths so weird and improbable that you wonder why embellishment was ever thought necessary in the first place.