Carolyn Elizabeth Robinson Cassady was a memoirist/ American writer associated with the Beat Generation through her marriage to Neal Cassady and her friendships with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and other Beat figures. She became a frequent character in the works of Jack Kerouac and became a prominent figure in documentaries, movies, lectures, books, and events discussing the legacy of the Beat Generation Movement.

Ms. Cassady, whom Jerry Cimino, director of the Beat Museum in San Francisco, called “the grande dame of the Beat Generation,” was a central figure in the real-life circle of friends whose travels across the country in search of kicks and revelation were immortalized in “On the Road.” She was the inspiration for the character Camille, the second wife of Dean Moriarty, the “wild yea-saying overburst of American joy” who makes the novel go go go. Dean Moriarty was based on Neal Cassady, her husband during the period recounted in the novel.

For a woman in the 1940s and ’50s, this was not an easy role. While her male peers, including her husband, celebrated the freedoms of sex, drugs, literature and the open road, Ms. Cassady was by turns an eager participant and a dissenting adult, the one who kept the utilities on, raised the children and watched with dismay as the next generation of young men emulated the self-destructive impulses of the last.