One and Only: The Untold Story of on the Road and Luanne Henderson, the Woman Who Started Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady on Their Jou

When Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady first met in New York City, they didn't like each other. How did they come to be best of friends, immortalized forever as Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty in On the Road?

Lu Anne loved them both, and she taught them how to love each other. In effect, she made the Beat Generation possible, and gave Kerouac material for one of the seminal novels of the twentieth century, now a major motion picture. Illustrated with over 40 rare archival photographs, One and Only: The Untold Story of On the Road reveals the hidden side of Neal and Jack, the real men behind the legends.

Beloved by both Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, Lu Anne Henderson has never told her story. Lu Anne was a beautiful 15-year-old girl in Denver in 1945 when she met Neal, a fast-talking hurricane of male sexuality. The two married, and soon they were hanging out with a group of young would-be writers, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. But Neal and Jack initially didnt like each other. Lu Anne ended up loving them both, and she taught them how to love each other — giving Kerouac material for one of the seminal novels of the 20th century, On the Road. One and Only traces the immense struggles of Lu Annes life, from the split-up of her family during the Great Depression to the ravages of abusive men and a late-life heroin addiction. It shows how her life intertwined with Jacks and Neals to the very end.

Gerald Nicosia is a biographer, historian, poet, playwright and novelist. His biography of Jack Kerouac, Memory Babe, won the Distinguished Young Writer Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters while still a work-in-progress. Called a “great book” by Allen Ginsberg and “by far the best of the many books published about Jack Kerouacs life and work” by William Burroughs, it is still widely regarded as the definitive work on Kerouac.

From his years of work with Vietnam veterans on their issues of healing from the war came his book Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans' Movement, which won numerous honors and was picked by the Los Angeles Times as one of the “Best Books of the Year” in 2001. He has written numerous critical articles and reviews for almost every major newspaper in the U.S., and he publishes his poetry widely in the small presses, having earned a number of Pushcart nominations along the way.

He has read his own work and organized readings on several continents, and has lectured on the Beats, Vietnam and the Sixties literally worldwide, at such venues as Columbia University in New York, Cambridge University in England, the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea, Wales, the Commune in Livorno, Italy and Sichuan University in Chengdu, China. Nicosia was invited by Director Walter Salles to pioneer the "Beat Boot Camp," creating an immersion experience for the actors in the upcoming major movie of On the Road.

Contents

Introduction

Note to the Transcription

Interview with Lu Anne

Lu Annes Role in Beat History / Cultural History

Al Hinkles Story

Letter to Neal

A Daughters Recollection