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Kerouac's "On The Road" revolves around the charismatic Dean Moriarty. The real-life model for this character was Neal Cassady, whom Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg met in 1947 in New York. Cassady was interested in Kerouac because he wanted to be a writer, and before the end of the self-destructive Cassady's life, it happened. "The First Third" collects all of the writing Cassady is known to have produced. This volume, originally released by City Lights Books in San Francisco in 1971 (3 years after Cassady's death in Mexico) also contains an afterword by second wife Carolyn Cassady, a 46-page prologue about the Cassady family before Neal and an editor's note from poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
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Something I guess I should've known before picking this one up is that it's kind of for beat completionists only, cause Cassady here just writes about his childhood and memories of growing up- it's not the standard Kerouac cross-country adventures nor the crazy psychedelic writings of Burroughs. But regardless, it's still good. The memoir itself is roughly only a hundred pages if you exclude his 40 page tale of family history. Cassady was an incredibly fascinating guy, still a little sad we really only got to hear about his childhood and not like, what happened after that (Well, I guess you kinda do if you read all of the “fragments” and letters and extra stuff). Anyway, I like long sentences, this guy is great at describing stuff, too.