I must take exception with the letter by James Asher titled Neal Cassady vs. Dexadrine in which he dismisses beat writers as "thieves, junkies and fucked up criminals." First of all, looking at the beats in a historical context, their writing was a reaction against the soul-killing conformity of the 1950s and the spectre of nuclear annhiliation. They were caught between "the man in the gray flannel suit" and postmodernism, and their writings reflect a yearning and a journey for man's personal quest for transcendence, which in the long run, is the greatest adventure of all. Being caught in the middle of societal upheaval, there is both beauty and ugliness in their works, much like the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch, caught between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. People who could be seen as influenced by and participating in the beat movement include such luminaries as Norman Mailer, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bob Dylan, Gary Snyder (who won the Pulitzer Prize for Turtle Island), Allen Ginsberg (who won the National Book Award in 1993 for The Fall of America), Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs and many others. The cut-up method used by Burroughs influenced many other writers, most notably, Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Pynchon who found it made lietrature more cinematic. While Neal Cassady did speed and acid and wrote a pretty decent autobiography "The First Third", his influence went beyond mere literature in being the living embodiment of the beat (and later hippy) aesthetic. Your repeating the story about Neal counting railroad ties is actually fiction: it never really happened! It came from a short story in Ken Kesey's book The Demon Box called "The Day Superman Died." If Neal had done nothing more than inspire "On the Road" and John Clennon Holmes "Go" as well as the Grateful Dead's song "The Other One", his place as a cultural icon would be insured. I think that Jim Irsay has done the nation a service by not only purchasing the original scroll of "On the Road", but by sending it on the road across America as a reminder that we , as a people, are about more than the military-industrial complex and mindless nationalism. In other words, dude, stop hating on the beats!