Re: Neal Cassady?

[Slurpeez]

My jaw just hit the floor; I can’t believe they released the mysterious man’s name before the episode airs!

In real life, Neal Cassady “served as the model for the character Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road.” That’s a classic bad-boy image right there. If anyone saw the recent film by the same name, you’ll get an instant idea of what is meant by the “Beat Generation.”

Although Cassady did not attend Columbia, he soon became friends with them and their acquaintances, some of whom later became members of the Beat Generation.

“Beatnik” is a word used to describe someone who is part of a nonconformist youth-culture that was an undercurrent in America in the 1950s and 1960s. A beatnik stereotype is one of sitting in a cafe, drinking coffee, playing the bongos and reciting poetry.

In October 1945, after being released from prison, [Cassady] married the fifteen-year-old LuAnne Henderson.

This seems to support the idea that fictional “Neal” is going to propose to a teenaged Emma, based on the episode description about a fellow thief wanting to make an honest woman out of her.

After Cassady’s marriage to LuAnne Henderson was annulled, Cassady married Carolyn on April 1, 1948. The couple eventually had three children and settled down in a ranch house in Monte Sereno, California, 50 miles south of San Francisco, where Kerouac and Ginsberg sometimes visited.[6] In 1950 he entered into a bigamous marriage with Diane Hansen, with whom he fathered one son, Curtis Hansen.

This makes me wonder if Emma actually was married to Henry’s father for a brief period, before having the marriage annulled. Perhaps he ended up married to someone else, but had an affair with Emma later on after she got out of jail. It’ll depend on how much the writers want to draw from Cassady’s real life as inspiration for Emma Swan’s and “Neal’s” lives.

AntBee wrote: I just had another thought. This is probably a good clue that August and Neal have to be connected then because they’re both obvious aliases based on famous literary figures.

I like that idea a lot! If August and Neal were friends who both like literature, it’d explain a lot. Perhaps Pinocchio chose August Wayne Booth as his pen name, since it’s an allusion to the literary critic Wayne Booth. Similary, Baelfire might’ve chosen the name Neal Cassady because he liked the book On the Road. My only question is why Emma never met August before he came to SB, since she obviously knew “Neal” and had a child with him. Maybe “Neal” met August after Emma was already out of the picture, which is when Baelfire realized August is actually Pinocchio from FTL, just like him.