From The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/24/books/carolyn-cassady-beat-generation-writer-dies-at-90.html?hpw&_r=2&
By JOHN LELAND
Published: September 23, 2013
Carolyn Cassady, a writer who entered the American consciousness in 1957 as a character in Jack Kerouac’s novel “On the Road,” and decades later chronicled her life as a member of the Beat Generation, died on Friday near her home in Bracknell, England. She was 90.
Her death was confirmed by her daughter Cathy Sylvia, who said Ms. Cassady lapsed into a coma after an emergency appendectomy.
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.
Her two books, “Heart Beat: My Life With Jack and Neal” (1976), which was made into a 1980 film, and “Off the Road: My Years With Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg” (1990), provided a sobering corrective to what she considered misconceptions about the essentially unhappy lives of these men, the poet Allen Ginsberg among them, even while excusing the worst of her husband’s transgressions.
“I kept thinking that the imitators never knew and don’t know how miserable these men were,” she told the novelist Gina Berriault in 1972. “They think they were having marvelous times — joy, joy, joy — and they weren’t at all.”
Ms. Cassady was born Carolyn Robinson on April 23, 1923, in East Lansing, Mich., the youngest of five siblings in a household that prized Victorian values and books — more than 2,500 of them. Her father was a biochemist and her mother a former English teacher.
The family moved to Nashville when Carolyn was 8. After attending an elite prep school and Bennington College in Vermont, she was studying painting and theater design in a graduate program at the University of Denver in March 1947 when her life took a wild turn — as several lives did in those days — in the person of Neal Cassady.
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