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. But secret rebels, like Joyce and her classmate Elise Cowen, refused to accept things as they were.Īs a teenager, Johnson stole down to Greenwich Village to sing folksongs in Washington Square. 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.

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. Johnson captures this period with deep clarity and moving insight.” – Dwight Garner, The New York Times “Among the great American literary memoirs of the past century. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award Ginsberg arranged for Glassman and Kerouac to meet on a blind date while she was working on her first novel, Come and Join the Dance, which was sold to Random House when she was only twenty-one and appeared five years later in 1962 just as she was starting her long career as a book editor.Named one of the 50 best memoirs of the past 50 years by The New York Times It was at Barnard that she became friends with Elise Cowen (briefly Allen Ginsberg's lover) who introduced her to the Beat circle. She matriculated at Barnard College at 16, failing her graduation by one class.

She was a child actress and appeared in the Broadway production of I Remember Mama, which she writes about in her 2004 memoir Missing Men.Īt the age of 13, Joyce rebelled against her controlling parents and began hanging out in Washington Square. Joyce Johnson (born 1935) is an American author of fiction and nonfiction who won a National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir Minor Characters about her relationship with Jack Kerouac.īorn Joyce Glassman to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, Joyce was raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a few blocks from the apartment of Joan Vollmer Adams where William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac lived from 1944 to 1946.

Minor characters a beat memoir