Neal Cassady - Biography - Personal Life

Personal Life

In October 1945, after being released from prison, he married the fifteen-year-old LuAnne Henderson. In 1947, Cassady and his wife moved to New York City, where they met Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg at Columbia University through Hal Chase, another protégé of Justin W. Brierly's. Although Cassady did not attend Columbia, he soon became friends with them and their acquaintances, some of whom later became members of the Beat Generation. Carolyn Robinson met Cassady in 1946 while she worked in Denver, Colorado, as a teaching assistant. Carolyn would leave the Beat group shortly after walking in on Neal, Allen Ginsberg and Neal's wife at the time, LuAnne, in bed together. Five weeks after her departure, Neal got an annulment from LuAnne and married Carolyn. Her book, Off the Road, details her marriage to Cassady and recalls him as "the archetype of the American Man."

After Cassady's marriage to LuAnne Henderson was annulled, Cassady married Carolyn on April 1, 1948. The couple eventually had three children and settled down in a ranch house in Monte Sereno, California, 50 miles south of San Francisco, where Kerouac and Ginsberg sometimes visited. In 1950 he entered into a bigamous marriage with Diane Hansen, with whom he fathered one son, Curtis Hansen. During this period, Cassady worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad and kept in touch with his "Beat" acquaintances even as they became increasingly different philosophically.

Cassady had a sexual relationship with Ginsberg which lasted off and on for the next twenty years, and he traveled cross-country with both Kerouac and Ginsberg on multiple occasions.