ReZoom

Jack Kerouac found Neal Cassady in Denver, and a lot of their local haunts were written into literary history ...

In initiating our Boomer Landmarks focus on ReZoom's City Sites, we have found a natural traveling companion in Jack Kerouac since he covered so much of the country. Though he hardly stayed anywhere for long, his extended stay (for him) in Denver provides the basis for much of his seminal work, On the Road.

The reason for his residency in Denver was his literary infatuation with the real life Neal Cassady whom he named Dean Moriarity in the book. Cassady's unbounded, uninhibited and often unlawful immersion in seizing every day became a model for experiencing the essences and consequences of corralling Life (with a capital "L") in post-war America.

Cassady landmarks can be found throughout Denver, since he was born and schooled here, and he moved around through the trials of his upbringing. The Colburn Hotel is one nexus chronicled by Kerouac where you can still go to Charlie Brown's Bar and imbibe the stories of Cassady carrying on three affairs at once with his ex-wife, his wife-to-be and Allen Ginsberg (the last two of which lived in the hotel in different rooms).

The city of Denver has provided Denver's Beat Poetry Driving Tour online by Beat historian Andrew Burnett that takes you back to this culturally formative time for boomer identity. It has six stops, the second of which is the Colburn. And Neal Cassady's son, John Allen Cassady, provides an online tour of his own, tracing with the Beat Museum's Beatmobile the footsteps of his exuberant, incorrigible dad.

 

City Sites Editor Jeff Stein (Jeffry John Stein) is the author of Life, Myth, and the American Family Unreeling.