American writer Neal Cassady was BOTD in 1926. Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, he was raised by his alcoholic father in Colorado, and was frequently homeless or in reform schools. Arrested repeatedly for car theft by his teams, he was mentored through high school by his teacher Justin Brierly, with whom he had his first homosexual experience. Imprisoned in 1944 for receiving stolen goods, he was released after a year, and travelled to New York, where he befriended writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Cassady’s frequent road trips across America and Olympic drug use were immortalised in Kerouac’s novel On the Road, which became the bible of the Beat Generation. Kerouac’s poetic stream-of-consciousness prose style is also thought to be based on Cassady’s unpublished writings. He was also referenced in Ginsberg’s poem Howl and Charles Bukowski’s Notes of a Dirty Old Man. In the 1960s, he befriended writers Tom Wolfe and Ken Kesey, whom he introduced to psychedelic drugs, and was one of the Merry Pranksters chronicled in Kesey’s book The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test. Married three times and with at least five children, Cassady had a sporadic 20-year relationship with Ginsberg, and almost certainly shagged Kerouac. He died in 1968 after an all-night bender at a wedding Mexico, aged 41. One of the most mythologised figures of the counterculture movement, he has been portrayed many times in literature, art and film, most notably by Garrett Henlund in the 2012 film of On the Road.