Jack Kerouac. Allen Ginsberg. William S. Burroughs. LeRoi Jones. Theirs are the names primarily associated with the Beat Generation. But what about Joyce Johnson (nee Glassman), Edie Parker, Elise Cowen, Diane Di Prima, and dozens of others? These female friends and lovers of the famous iconoclasts are now beginning to be recognized for their own roles in forging the Beat movement and for their daring attempts to live as freely as did the men in their circle a decade before Women's Liberation. Twenty-one-year-old Joyce Johnson, an aspiring novelist and a secretary at a New York literary agency, fell in love with Jack Kerouac on a blind date arranged by Allen Ginsberg nine months before the publication of On the Road made Kerouac an instant celebrity. While Kerouac traveled to Tangiers, San Francisco, and Mexico City, Johnson roamed the streets of the East Village, where she found herself in the midst of the cultural revolution the Beats had created. Minor Characters portrays the turbulent years of her relationship with Kerouac with extraordinary wit and love and a cool, critical eye, introducing the reader to a lesser known but purely original American voice: her own.
Industry Reviews
What Joyce Johnson is doing here, then, is several things. Sure, she's writing a memoir of the '50s, the 'Beat Generation' and Kerouac in particular . . . But she's also writing her own biography and summation of the times . . . taking these two themes, she merges them into the idea of 'minor characters,' those people who live just as intensely or more so than those who are defining 'what's going on,' but who still, under these inaccurate definitions, come in as minor characters . . . a tender, sweet intelligent book. Carolyn See, Los Angeles Times; [Johnson] has brought to life what history may ultimately judge to have been minor characters, but who were to her own generation major enough to shape its consciousness. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times; Joyce Johnson hands over to us the safe-deposit box that contains the lost, precious scrolls of the New York '50s. Seymour Krim, The Washington Post; MINOR CHARACTERS is an avowedly nostalgic portrait that captures the excitement, the strangeness and the often misdirected and destructive energy of those lost days. The Philadelphia Enquirer; The love story of Joyce from the upper westside who journeys to the village on the subway, putting on a pair of copper earrings en route, and Jack, the confused, mother-tied, suddenly famous road poet from Lowell, Massachusetts . . . a first-rate memoir, very beautiful, very sad. . . E. L. Doctorow; Johnson, who was living with Kerouac when the novel that made him famous came out, has given us in Minor Characters a dispassionate portrait of a time that has since become a literary myth . . . at once forgiving and wry. James Atlas, The Atlantic; Tender and complex . . . far more than a simple enumeration of the highs and lows of an underground romance with Jack Kerouac . . . her book becomes a moving story of adolescent rebellion, and then a fascinating meditation on the relations between the sexes by one who in her Bohemian youth took a measure of freedom unthinkable to most women of her time. The Boston Globe; [A] lovely, poignant memoir . . . Minor Characters glows with affection. Todd Gitlin, The Nation; Realistic rather than flamboyant, Johnson succeeds in portraying the Beats not as oddities or celebrities but as individuals. In wry retrospect, she recognizes the folly of young women rebelling against their well-meaning parents only to become subservient to indifferent men. The New Yorker; Joyce Johnson does much more than add her personal memoir to the history of the Beats . . . Her honest story illuminates a classic pattern of feminine ambivalence, blurred direction and girlish dreams. Susan Brownmiller; A beautifully written venture into iconoclasm. Now, realer heroines emerge as Beat gods fall, along with all the strutting princes of literature. Sol Yurick; With a style balanced between lyricism and forceful clarity, Joyce Johnson has become one of our premier memoirists. O, The Oprah Magazine; Joyce Johnson summons up the mythic Greenwich Village of jazz, poetry and black-stockinged Bohemia with infinite ironic grace. She was, briefly, a muse for all those messy Beat angels. This is the muse's side of the story. It turns out the muse could write as well as anybody. Angela Carter; An open, perfect memoir: the one to read when you think you are tired of memoirs: the one to study when you think you might write one. It's here. In print and every word is right. Jill Robinson; Rich and beautifully written, full of vivid portraits and evocations . . . of the major Beat voices and the minor characters, their women San Francisco Chronicle; A major literary event, describing with a rare blend of intelligence and grace the difficult process of becoming, in Doris Lessing's words, a "free woman." Ann Charters
