Throughout their marriage, Cassady competed with the attentions of several women, including the divorced first wife and a third wife from a bigamous marriage – as well as Ginsberg, with whom Neal had a 20-year on-off affair. In last year's film adaptation of the novel, Camille was played by Kirsten Dunst. This desertion formed the basis of the road trip that Kerouac later chronicled in On The Road, in which Carolyn was depicted as the character Camille. When their first child, Cathleen Joanne, was three months old, Neal used their savings of $900 to buy a new 1949 Hudson for a trip to New York City to collect Kerouac. Cassady, from a conventional, middle-class family, landed in their full-throttle, amphetamine-crazed world and attempted, unsuccessfully, to make a conventional family man out of Kerouac's muse, Neal Cassady. The Beats – most notably Kerouac, Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Michael McClure – were a close-knit group of poets and writers in the years following the Second World War known for their experimentation with drugs, sexual freedom, fascination with Eastern religions, rejection of materialism and, above all, the explicit autobiographical writings that put them at odds with the prevailing social order of the 1950s. Carolyn Cassady was the lover of Jack Kerouac and the wife of his friend Neal Cassady, the "Dean Moriarty" of Kerouac's 1957 novel On The Road – which, along with Allen Ginsburg's poem Howl, is the best-known product of the Beat Generation.
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