Countercultural Icon. He became an American counterculture icon of the Beatniks of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. He was the inspiration for the character "Dean Moriarty," in Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," and one of the inspirations for Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl." While his parents were traveling to California, he was born, according to his birth certificate, in Salt Lake County General Hospital and not in the backseat of a car as some sources state. He was his mother's eighth child. His father was Neal Marshall Casady, with a second "S" being added to the surname later. After his parents separated when he was age six, he wandered the west with his alcoholic father, riding freight trains with hobos or living in poverty in the Denver slums. When he attended public schools, he was a good student and an excellent athlete. By the age of 15, he was involved with petty crimes, eventually becoming a car thief and by the age of 21, had been arrested six times. In an attempt to help him better himself, he was afforded a chance to attend Columbia University in New York City but missed the deadline for registration by several weeks. For a time, he was tutored by other college students, including poet Allen Ginsberg, until he moved back to Denver. By 1950, he had married three times but had only one divorce and soon had three children. He was "Dean Moriarty," one of the characters, in Jack Kerouac's 1957 book "On the Road." The book became a success, ranking at #55 in the 100 Best English-speaking Novels of the 20th Century by "Time" magazine and Random House publishing. In 2012, the book was adapted into a film debuting at Cannes Film Festival and being nominated for awards. In 1958 after moving to California, he was arrested on narcotics charges and spent two years in in the prison of San Quentin. During the hippie era of the 1960s, he became anti-establishment, was a part of the countercultural movement that rejected the mores of mainstream America, and was taking various drugs, including LSD. In 1962 he met the author of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," Ken Kesey, and they became close colleagues and living communally with others. In 1964, he became the driver of "Further," a 1939 psychedelically painted bus, which traveled from the New York City World's Fair to California, with a group of Kesey's followers, the Merry Prankster. In January of 1968, he traveled to Mexico to make an avant-garde film. On the evening of February 3, 1968 after attending a party, he left to go to a train depot. He was found the next morning beside the railroad tracks in a coma from a fatal mixture of alcohol and tranquilizer, and later he died at the local hospital. In 2007, the film about his life "Neal Cassady" was released.