The Beat’s Holy Grail: The Letter That Inspired ‘On the Road’

Read Neal Cassady’s a never-before-published excerpt from the infamous “Joan Anderson Letter” at Alta Magazine. The letter rambled vividly and profanely through a crazy story about a few days in Denver in late 1945, beginning with Cassady meeting “a perfect beauty of such loveliness that I forgot everything else and immediately swore to forgo all my ordinary pursuits until I made her”: Joan Anderson. This was what Kerouac admired most about the letter: the way Cassady’s personality exploded off the page.

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