Off the Road
Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg has been republished by London's Black Spring Press to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Jack Kerouac's seminal On the Road. Off the Road recounts the history of Carolyn Cassady wife of Jack Kerouac's sometime travelling companion and hero Neal Cassady. As Neal's wife and intermittent lover of Kerouac, Carolyn Cassady was remarkably placed to record the inception of the Beat Generation and the massive cultural shift that entailed.
Off the Road begins in the initial stages of Kerouac and Neal Cassady's friendship, the former, a struggling author trying to publish his first novel. Going on to encompass the explosive success of On the Road and Allen Ginsberg's Howl, the social revolution of the 1960s, which saw Cassady as the famed driver of Ken Kesey's legendary Merry Pranksters' bus.