Kerouac's "On The Road" revolves around the charismatic Dean Moriarty. The real-life model for this character was Neal Cassady, whom Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg met in 1947 in New York. Cassady was interested in Kerouac because he wanted to be a writer, and before the end of the self-destructive Cassady's life, it happened. "The First Third" collects all of the writing Cassady is known to have produced. This volume, originally released by City Lights Books in San Francisco in 1971 (3 years after Cassady's death in Mexico) also contains an afterword by second wife Carolyn Cassady, a 46-page prologue about the Cassady family before Neal and an editor's note from poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti.