Neal Cassady with cigarette young & vigorous age 29 with salesman surveying North Beach used car lot, he needed new wheels. Bay Area Johnny Appleseed of pot from early 1950’s, he worked as conductor on Southern Pacific Railroad, averted train crash as brakeman years earlier, breaking his ankle, collected insurance, bought his family a ranch-house in Los Gatos down the peninsula, gambled madly & disastrously at horse racetrack, wrote painfully in pencil on his “The First Third” autobiographical manuscript, visited me overnight in rooms on Polk and Montgomery Streets, San Francisco, sometime March 1955.
1955, printed later
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
gelatin silver print
Dimensions
image: 37.47 x 24.13 cm (14 3/4 x 9 1/2 in.) sheet: 40.5 x 50.5 cm (15 15/16 x 19 7/8 in.)
Classification
Photograph
Department
CPH
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Gift of Gary S. Davis
Accession Number
2009.108.4
About the Artist
Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), born in Newark, New Jersey, emerged as a multifaceted figure in American culture, best known as a Beat Generation poet but also a prolific visual artist whose photographs, drawings, and prints captured the raw energy of his era. His early life offers little documentation on artistic training, though he attended Columbia University in the 1940s, where he formed connectio...