The story of its disappearance and emergence is a shaggy dog tale in its own right. The letter was rediscovered in 2012 after the death of record producer Jack Spinosa he got it from a colleague named Richard Emerson, who ran a small publishing company called Golden Goose Press. The Joan Anderson Letter, it turns out, was not missing. “ast, mad, confessional, completely serious,” Kerouac called Cassady in a 1968 Paris Review interview he is remembered as the inspiration for Dean Moriarty, the central character in Kerouac’s 1957 breakthrough novel On the Road. He may not have been there at the inception point-the moment that Jack Kerouac, then a student at Columbia University, met Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs in 1942-but in every way that matters, he was the catalyst. It’s conventional wisdom that without Neal Cassady, there would not be a Beat Generation. She was talking about his infamous “Joan Anderson Letter,” one of the legendary lost artifacts of American literature. At the front of the room, Cathy Cassady, 69, was narrating a PowerPoint presentation about her father, Neal. About 20 people, mostly older-gray hair, jeans and open sandals-occupied a few rows of folding chairs in an upstairs gallery on a Saturday afternoon early this summer. The audience at the Beat Museum in San Francisco’s North Beach was small, and it fit a certain profile. Read Neal Cassady’s a never-before-published excerpt from the infamous “ Joan Anderson Letter” at Alta Magazine.
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