Heart Beat: My Life With Jack and Neal

by Carolyn Cassady

The book explores the love triangle of real-life characters Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, and Carolyn Cassady in the late 1950s and the 1960s.

Genres: Biography, Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir

93 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1976

About the author

Carolyn Elizabeth Robinson Cassady was a memoirist/ American writer associated with the Beat Generation through her marriage to Neal Cassady and her friendships with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and other Beat figures. She became a frequent character in the works of Jack Kerouac and became a prominent figure in documentaries, movies, lectures, books, and events discussing the legacy of the Beat Generation Movement.

Ms. Cassady, whom Jerry Cimino, director of the Beat Museum in San Francisco, called “the grande dame of the Beat Generation,” was a central figure in the real-life circle of friends whose travels across the country in search of kicks and revelation were immortalized in “On the Road.” She was the inspiration for the character Camille, the second wife of Dean Moriarty, the “wild yea-saying overburst of American joy” who makes the novel go go go. Dean Moriarty was based on Neal Cassady, her husband during the period recounted in the novel.

For a woman in the 1940s and ’50s, this was not an easy role. While her male peers, including her husband, celebrated the freedoms of sex, drugs, literature and the open road, Ms. Cassady was by turns an eager participant and a dissenting adult, the one who kept the utilities on, raised the children and watched with dismay as the next generation of young men emulated the self-destructive impulses of the last.

Reviews

[Justo · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is written in a way that is very easy to read. This book is about a 12 year old girl. She enjoys running. This book is written in first person. She explains how she her life at home, and in school. She explains her feelings towards her grandfather, new born brother, and her parents. She also takes an interest in art as through out the book she is assigned to draw an apple. To be honest i did not really enjoy this book and proceeded to bore me through out the entore book. But if some one where to read it I would recommend it to anyone who likes drawing and running.

[Tanya Hallam · Rating 5 out of 5]

The perfect book for a plane ride. I read Off The Road by Carolyn Cassady in high school 20 years ago. While it is a far more detailed book, Heartbeat is a nice intro to CC and the two loves of her life. Highly recommend both books!

[wigger · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sane, rational & heart felt description of her life w/ Jack & Neal. It helped me to understand how she could "stand by her men" with so much craziness going on.

[Tom Romig · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 1952-53, Jack Kerouac lived off and on with Neal and Carolyn Cassady and their children. This slim book is Carolyn Cassady's account of her tangled relationship with her unstable husband and her sometime lover Kerouac, not a model of stability himself. Jack and Neal come across as rather remarkably immature and self-absorbed, while Carolyn often seems to be bent on self-abnegation. (At one point she writes to Neal, "Tell me what you want me to do and how you want me to be and what sort of picture you have of the woman you love so I can try living up to it." Yes, it's the early 50s, but yikes!)

On the copyright page is a note saying that Heart Beat is an excerpt from a work in progress. This turned out to be a far longer and, according to the reviews, a far better book published in 1990, Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg.

[Paolo Aldrovandi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Non fondamentale ma importante da leggere per capire alcune dinamiche.