Innate inside Salt Lake City and raised by an alcoholic father inside Denver, Cassady spent much of his youth bouncing between skid-row hotels by owning his father & reform schools for car theft. Within 1946 Cassady met Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg at Columbia University in New York & quickly became friends with a two & the circle of creative person and writers there. He got the intimate relationship by using Ginsberg that lasted on & off for the next twenty years, and he afterwards traveled cross-united states by having Kerouac. Cassady proved to become a catalyst for a Beat Movement, appearing when the hero Dean Moriarty & Cody Pomeray around several of Kerouac's novels; Ginsberg mentioned him too, within his ground-innovative verse form, Howl ("N.C., secret hero of these poems..."). In addition, he is ordinarily given credit for helping Kerouac break ties using his Thomas Wolfe -inspired sentimental style and discover his have unique voice across "spontaneous prose", a stream of consciousness approach to writing.

In the late 1950's, Cassady settled down, married Carolyn Cassady, started the personal & went to act for the railroad. When he saved around touch by having his Beat counterparts, it drift away philosophically. Within 1964, Cassady met up sustaining Ken Kesey, becoming part of the Merry Pranksters and serving as a half-crazed driver of the bus known as Furthur, which was soon fallowing immortalized inside Tom Wolfe's book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He late played the large role in the California psychedelic scene of the 1960s.

Within January, 1968, Cassady was holding court at the beach home upright south of Puerta Vallarta, Mexico using girlfriend Annie Murphy, fellow Prankster George "Barely Visible" Walker & a select few Berkeley folk, Barbara Wilson & Walter Cox, world health organization got caused down in their aquamarine '48 Dodge, "Bilbo Baggins." A times were good of classic Cassady performances ("...like a trained bear," Carolyn Cassady utilized to say)--of these h& on the wheel of the large Ford sedan when it careened along dusty lanes and grazed passersby, 100%-nightlong story telling, speed diarrhea around George's psychedelic Lotus & plenty of acid for everyone. At one point Cassady took Walter, 20, aside & spoke his sorrow:

"It's no good, I'm all washed up. Twenty years of fast living, there's just not much left. And my kids are all screwed up. Don't do what I've done."

When the person witharound San Miguel diamond state Allende in early February, 1968 Cassady went walking by the railroad to email the next town, however passed call at the cold & showery nighttime wearing nothing however a T-shirt & his jeans. inside the morning he was noticed in the coma by the track and brought to the nearest hospital, in which he died two or three hours late. He was 41.

Kesey retells the story of his demise within a short story named The Day After Superman Died (within his collected short stories published when Demon Pack) in which Cassady is quoted by having mumbling a total of nails (sixty-4 thous& nine hundred and twenty-eight, 64928) in the rail he'd counted then far, when his go words prior to death.

Cassady never earned anything for his role in the Beat Movement, however his autobiography A Foremost Third was published posthumously.

A film "The Last Time I Committed Suicide" (1997) is based on a "[http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Workshop/5083/letter3.html Joan Anderson letter]" written by Cassady to Jack Kerouac. A film was directed by Stephen Kay and it starred Thomas Jane as Cassady. A cast as well involved Adrien Brody, Gretchen Mol, Claire Forlani and Keanu Reeves.