Neal Cassady, “Joan Anderson Letter,” c. 1950. Jack Kerouac Collection, 1950-1978.

In December 1950, Jack Kerouac received a 16,000 word letter that would utterly revolutionize his approach to narrative prose. After reading Neal Cassady’s rambling, amphetamine-fueled confession detailing everything from his first orgasm to a girlfriend’s attempted suicide, Kerouac abruptly realized the profound importance of rigorous honesty and naked vulnerability in effective storytelling. “What a man most wishes to hide, revise, and un-say is precisely what Literature is waiting and bleeding for,” Kerouac would later insist.

By providing a blueprint for the confessional, unregulated style that so thoroughly captivated his reader, Cassady’s correspondence laid the foundation for Kerouac’s spontaneous prose method and thus changed the course of Beat literature forever. If Kerouac’s work has ever felt like an intimate confessional for your eyes only, thank Neal Cassady and the letter that revealed everything and concealed nothing. It’s a story about a girlfriend that created Beat literature as it is known today.