"Neal Cassady is best remembered today as Jack Kerouac's muse and the basis for the character Dean Moriarty in Kerouac's classic On the Road, and as one of the merriest of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, the driver of the psychedelic bus Further, immortalized in Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." "This definitive new collection brings together for the first time more than two hundred letters to Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes, and other Beat generation luminaries, as well as an important selection between Neal and his wife, Carolyn. These letters (for the most part previously unpublished) cover Neal's life between the ages of eighteen and forty-one and finish just a few months before his death in February 1968. This collection presents the real Neal Cassady - raw and uncut."--BOOK JACKET.