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Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir Paperback – July 1, 1999
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Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
“Among the great American literary memoirs of the past century . . . a riveting portrait of an era . . . Johnson captures this period with deep clarity and moving insight.” – Dwight Garner, The New York Times
In 1954, Joyce Johnson’s Barnard professor told his class that most women could never have the kinds of experiences that would be worth writing about. Attitudes like that were not at all unusual at a time when “good” women didn’t leave home or have sex before they married; even those who broke the rules could merely expect to be minor characters in the dramas played by men. But secret rebels, like Joyce and her classmate Elise Cowen, refused to accept things as they were.
As a teenager, Johnson stole down to Greenwich Village to sing folksongs in Washington Square. She was 21 and had started her first novel when Allen Ginsberg introduced her to Jack Kerouac; nine months later she was with Kerouac when the publication of On the Road made him famous overnight. Joyce had longed to go on the road with him; instead she got a front seat at a cultural revolution under attack from all sides; made new friends like Hettie and LeRoi Jones, and found herself fighting to keep the shy, charismatic, tormented Kerouac from destroying himself. It was a woman’s adventure and a fast education in life. What Johnson and other Beat Generation women would discover were the risks, the heartache and the heady excitement of trying to live as freely as the rebels they loved.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateJuly 1, 1999
- Dimensions5.08 x 0.75 x 7.69 inches
- ISBN-109780140283570
- ISBN-13978-0140283570
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–Angela Carter
“This little known Beat Generation memoir uncovers the hidden female characters who played pivotal roles in the progression of the 1950’s literary movement. One can imagine how Hannah’s bookish heart beats to the drum of figures like Edie Parker and Elise Cowen and Joyce Johnson.”
– Lena Dunham
“Rich and beautifully written, full of vivid portraits and evocations of the major Beat voices and the minor characters, their women.”
--Anne Lamott, The San Francisco Chronicle
"A first-rate memoir, very beautiful, very sad."
--E.L. Doctorow
“Minor Characters is, in its quiet but deliberate way, among the great American literary memoirs of the past century . . . [It] is not just about the Beats . . . in part it’s a portrait of Johnson’s cloistered middle-class childhood on the Upper West Side. . .Best of all, perhaps, this book charts Johnson’s own career as a budding writer . . .it’s a book about a so-called minor character who, in the process of writing her life, became a major one.”
– Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review
"Joyce Johnson hands over to us the safe-deposit box that contains lost, precious scrolls of the New York '50s."
--The Washington Post
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : 0140283579
- Publisher : Penguin Books; unknown edition (July 1, 1999)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780140283570
- ISBN-13 : 978-0140283570
- Item Weight : 8.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.08 x 0.75 x 7.69 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #852,562 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,144 in Literary Criticism & Theory
- #4,163 in Author Biographies
- #24,670 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Joyce Johnson (née Glassman) was born in 1935 in New York, the city that has been
the setting for all her books. At eight, she began her brief career as a child actress,
which included a role in the original Broadway production of I Remember Mama.
She attended Hunter College High School and entered Barnard College in 1951
when she was sixteen. At nineteen she left home and landed her first job in
publishing as a secretary in the literary agency Curtis Brown. By that time she
had also begun work on her first novel, Come and Join the Dance, which was
inspired by her determination to write about the real lives of young women,
including a frank treatment of their sexual experiences—a taboo subject during
the repressed 1950’s. In 1956, she enrolled in a novel workshop at the New School,
taught by the editor Hiram Haydn, who bought her book for Random House the
following year on the basis of its first fifty pages. Because of her tumultuous life, it
took her another five years to complete the novel. Although long out of print, it is regarded by scholars like Ann Douglas, Nancy Grace and Ronna Johnson as an important contribution to Beat literature, since it was the first Beat novel by a woman.
In January 1957, Joyce Johnson met Jack Kerouac on a blind date arranged by Allen Ginsberg—the beginning of
an affair that lasted for two years. (Kerouac wrote about it in Desolation Angels.) She was with him on the September
night when the New York Times Review of On the Road brought him instant fame as the voice of his generation
and she soon began to experience the heady excitement of being in the midst of an ongoing cultural revolution
as the Beat movement spead throughout America. She was also the firsthand witness of the destructive effects
of Kerouac’s celebrity. Johnson considers this period the most important part of her education and remains
grateful to Kerouac for the encouragement he gave her to continue writing; she believes the many letters they
exchanged during their romance had a direct impact upon her writing style. In 1972, three years after Kerouac’s
untimely death, she was able to get his experimental novel Visions of Cody published at McGraw-Hill, where
she was working as an editor. It was the book he considered his masterpiece.
Come and Join the Dance was published in 1962, when Johnson was twenty-six, but it was not until 1978 that her
second novel Bad Connections was published. The intervening years were filled with demanding editorial jobs,
two brief marriages, the birth of her son Daniel Pinchbeck, and the challenge of becoming a single parent. Like
many women artists, she had to put the creative work that meant the most to her aside. In 1981, when she was
the executive editor of the Dial Press, Johnson began getting up at dawn to work on her new book, the memoir
Minor Characters, about her coming of age in the 1950’s and her involvement with Kerouac and the Beat circle.
It had taken her twenty-five years to get the right perspective upon that time and to see her own story as it
related to the experiences of the young women of her generation. In 1983, the book won a National Book
Critics Circle Award and has remained in print ever since.
Johnson’s third novel, In the Night Café, based on the story of her first marriage to the painter James Johnson,
who was killed in a motorcycle crash a year after their wedding, was published in 1987 to wide critical praise.
A chapter first published in Harper’s as a shsort story won first prize in the O’Henry Awards. Johnson’s next
book, What Lisa Knew: The Truths and Lies of the Steinberg Case, her first foray into investigative journalism
appeared in 1989 and received a front-page review in the New York Times. In 2000, Johnson published Door
Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, which contained her correspondence with Kerouac and a running
commentary that reflected her deepening understanding of his life and work. Her second critically praised
memoir Missing Men was published in 2004. She continues to experiment with various genres—most recently
biography. In her new book, The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac, she feels she has broken new
ground in the intimate way she has examined the development of a writer.
As an editor, Johnson was well known for books that related to the Civil Rights movement and the New Left:
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual by Harold Cruse; Blues People by LeRoi Jones, Revolution for the Hell of It by
Abbie Hoffman, Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody; and Born on the Fourth of July by Ron Kovic.
After ending her publishing career, Johnson taught creative writing in a number of MFA programs, including
Columbia’s School of the Arts and the New School. Since 1984, she has been teaching a memoir workshop
at the 92nd Street YMHA.
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That was Joyce Johnson's biggest success here. She brought these characters alive for me and made me feel for them and sympathize with them. I am not one hundred percent sure what the reason is, but I suspect her own love for these people played a large part in my own warming to them. I could see them not just as these detached literary figures, sanctified by generations of hipster kids, but as real people, with real flaws. And instead of those flaws making my distaste for the Beats feel vindicated, they made invited me into the lives of these men and especially the women. And I didn't want to leave.
Even though I already knew how the story ended for all these characters, both major and minor, I didn't want the end of the book to come. Even as I rushed headlong toward the end of the narrative, I didn't want to reach that last page. I was hoping that Johnson would finish on the happy notes, or at least the bittersweet ones. But she doesn't hold back. Just as she let us into the lives of these rising stars of literature, she also let us into their downfall--either into anonymity or early death. Or both.