Carolyn Cassady

Carolyn Cassady didn’t just know the Beat Generation–she married into it. For 16 trying years, from 1947 to 1963, she was the wife of Neal Cassady, the hell-raising, jazz-loving, motormouthed force of nature who was the basis for the character of Dean Moriarty in On the Road, Jack Kerouac’s momentous 1957 novel–in which Carolyn appears as Moriarty’s wife Camille.

Cassady, who was 90 when she died on Sept. 20, chronicled her time in the strenuous company of those charming, difficult men in two memoirs, Heart Beat: My Life With Jack and Neal and Off the Road: My Years With Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg. (The former became a film with Sissy Spacek as Carolyn, Nick Nolte as Neal and John Heard as Kerouac.) Though she described him as a man who worked hard sometimes to be a good parent and provider, Neal was–no surprise–an inconstant mate, bedding other women and sealing his bromance with Kerouac by nudging Carolyn into an affair with him. For all that, she wrote about her husband fondly and well in books that showed she was much more than just Neal Cassady’s widow.

–Richard Lacayo