Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

by Joyce Johnson

Overview

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Johnson's Beat memoir is "the safe-deposit box that contains the last, precious scrolls of the New York '50s" (The Washington Post).

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.

"Rich and beautifully written, full of vivid portraits and evocations." --San Francisco Chronicle

"--A first-rate memoir, very beautiful, very sad." --E. L. Doctorow

"Realistic rather than flamboyant, [Johnson] succeeds in portraying the Beats not as oddities or celebrities but as individuals." --The New Yorker

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780413777157
Publisher:	Methuen Publishing, Ltd.
Publication date:	07/28/2011
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

About the Author

Joyce Johnson's eight books include the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award winner Minor Characters, the recent memoir Missing Men, the novel In the Night Cafe, and Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters 1957-1958 (with Jack Kerouac). She has written for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and lives in New York City.

Reading Group Guide

1. Why were misogynistic attitudes so pervasive in America in the 1950s? How much have attitudes toward women changed since then? Or are we seeing a resurgence of 1950s thinking?
 
2. Why did Johnson call her memoir Minor Characters? Are Kerouac and Ginsberg the major characters in her book or Johnson and Elise Cowen?
 
3. What messages in On the Road spoke powerfully to women as well as men back in 1957? Do they still?
 
4. Was the publication of On the Road the event that started the culture war? Has this novel found a secure place in the American literary canon, or is it still perceived as an outlaw work?
 
5. Why are some women so attracted to challenging—even hopelessly “impossible”—men? Are there still relationships like the one Johnson had with Kerouac? Can a woman like Johnson find a certain kind of freedom in loving a man who won’t commit?
 
6. Why have so few women writers emerged from the 1950s and early sixties? Are there other women writers readers should be rediscovering?
 
7. Why were the women of the Beat Generation unable to transform the kinds of relationships they had with men? What were the penalties for sexual liberation sixty years ago?
 
8. Would Elise Cowen have survived if she had been born a decade later? Why did she never share her poems with friends while she was alive?

Editorial Reviews

Johnson's 1987 NBCC Award- winning memoir of the 1950s and her relationship with Kerouac and other beats features a new introduction by the author. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Minor Characters is, in its quiet but deliberate way, among the great American literary memoirs of the past century…[Johnson's] book is a riveting portrait of an era…a glowing introduction to the Beats. There are shrewd portraits of not just Kerouac and Ginsberg but people like Robert Frank and Hettie Jones. Johnson has a knack for summing up a character in a blazing line or two…Minor Characters is better than all but a handful of books the boy-Beats themselves wrote. It's a book about a so-called minor character who, in the process of writing her life, became a major one.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

"This is the muse's side of the story.  It turns out the muse could write as well as anybody."
–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

From the Publisher