Off the Road: My Years With Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg

Media:	Paperback
Author:	Carolyn Cassady
Publisher:	Penguin Books
Release date:	01 August, 1991
List price:	~~$16.00~~
Our price:	$10.88 that is 32% off!

Off the Road: My Years With Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg

Average rating: Stars

Very Enjoyable!

I enjoyed this book immensely. A behind the scenes view of what life was really like for your favorite Beat personas. The book was easy to read and hard to put down.

Off the Road: My Years With Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg - Carolyn Cassady

Not bad overview

This book is all right, I must say that I enjoy the fact that Carolyn owns up to her own faults, such as her jealousy and such. I think that it is easy to judge her from 50 years down the line because so much has changed socially. She fell in love with Cassady at a time where women didn't just get up and leave their men if they were cheated on. Divorce was not as common as it is now. The women of the beat generation lived life on the edge of suburbanism. Most of them found themselves in the unusual and yet somehow liberating situation of being the primary breadwinner. I found Carolyn Cassady's biography to be an interesting account of an intelligent and talented woman who walked the line between her own more old fashioned sense of morality and the life Neal Cassady introduced her to. She mostly seemed to want his friends to go away. I think that he still would have been as wild if they did go away, he would have just found new friends. I don't blame her bitter attitude toward a lot of his friends though. It is a frustrating experience when someone's friends see only the party side of them and don't see what it does to the person's family.

Carolyn did, unfortunately, hang tight for a while to her belief that she could hold onto her husband. Hard to say if her version of their relationship is accurate or not. I do believe her account of what happened, but I also believe that he was a smooth talking guy who probably had similar conversations with his other two wives as well as all those other women. This obviously has to be a biased book, it involves the woman's marriage, I should not expect her to be able to look at things too objectively.

I guess the reason I call this book only "all right" is in part for selfish reasons (I like Neal Cassady, I like Allen Ginsberg, I like the Grateful Dead, I like Ken Kesey), the same things I appreciate about the book, such as her bitterness and jealousy, are the same things that kept me from fully enjoying it. The other reason I call this book merely "all right" is because Carolyn is not a writer. Joyce Johnson's memoir "Minor Characters" blows Cassady out of the water. While Cassady's life seems to have revolved around her husband, Johnson's somewhat brief affair with Kerouac is not her only claim to fame. She is an author in her own right and quite a good one. So Cassady's book reads more like a biography and Johnson's more like a novel. Which is all right. But still kept the book from being the sort of thing I would reread over and over.

And for the record, to respond to someone's questions about the author's facts - I don't believe Carolyn states that Kerouac died on Oct. 31, but rather that is when she found out about it. Also, he did not die on the 20th, but rather the 21st.

Carolyn Cassady - Off the Road: My Years With Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg

great portrait of cassady and kerouac

As great as the Beat fiction is, and life-changing as On the Road is, we get too caught up with the fictitive personas of the Beats. It's nice to see the side of Kerouac, Cassady, and Ginsberg that didn't make it into the novels. I'm sure Carolyn's viewpoint is skewed a little, but so is what we read in On the Road. Between her work and their work we can get a picture of what they were like, not as legends, but as men.

There are times when Carolyn bogs down with too much detail, or too much whining, or patches that just aren't great writing, but all in all it is a good biography, autobiography, and novel.

If you want to know more, here is a good place to start, along with these books, though you probably have read them by now: Kerouac's On the Road and The Dharma Bums; Cassady's The First Third; Perry and Babb's On the Bus; Ginsberg's Howl

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