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Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir, by Joyce Johnson
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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.
- Sales Rank: #349260 in Books
- Published on: 1999-07-01
- Released on: 1999-07-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.71" h x .62" w x 5.08" l, .46 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 304 pages
From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"'This is the muses's side of the story, it turns out the muse could write as well as anybody.' Angela Carter 'Rich and beautifully written, full of vivid portraits and evocations... of the major beat voices and the minor characters, their women.' San Francisco Chronicle 'Minor Characters is an avowedly nostalgic portrait that captures the excitement, the strangeness and the often mis-directed and destructive energy of those lost days,' The Philadelphia Inquirer 'Realistic rather than flamboyant, [Johnson] succeeds in portraying the Beats not as oddities or celebrities but as individuals.' The New Yorker"
From the Publisher
National Book Critics Circle Award-winner, Minor Characters has deservedly become known among the cognoscenti as a classic about the 1950s, a vivid and compelling memoir of one woman's coming of age amidst the angels and poets of the Beat Generation. The friend and lover of Jack Kerouac during the two years surrounding the publication of On The Road --the book that made him suddenly and forever famous--Johnson describes with penetrating insight the circle of rebellious visionaries of which she became a part: Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, LeRoi Jones, Gregory Corso. But more than just chronicling the drama of her life with a diffident and often drunken Kerouac, Johnson describes the roles that she and the other women in her circle played as companions and acolytes to their male muses, women who set aside their own needs and ambitions, for a time, even as they searched to find their own voices and shape their own lives. As Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in The New York 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." Anchor Books is proud to be reissuing Minor Characters with a new introduction by the author that helps to place the Beat Generation in the context of the 1990s.
"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
"Johnson writes of Dostoevskian evenings, of Kerouac's disastrous confrontation with fame...of the major Beat voices and the minor characters, their women. It's a terrific book, rich and beautifully written, full of vivid portraits and evocations."--San Francisco Chronicle
Most helpful customer reviews
33 of 33 people found the following review helpful.
Read it for Joyce, not just Jack
By C. Ebeling
Joyce Johnson's memoir of emerging from an overprotected childhood and landing at the center of the Beat movement in the 1950's is a delight whether you choose to read it for its portrait of Jack Kerouac, for the world that was, or for the inner journey it reveals. It is a fine literary performance. Johnson plays with tense and perspective as if they form a telescopic lens sliding the past out of a fuzzy black and white still photograph into a vivid, colorful present. There is a suspenseful tension to the book from which flows a novelistic structure, never, though, at the expense of truth. Johnson gets down like no one else how it is to carry around that overprotected childhood, to always feel that you could be missing something, that the center has yet to be achieved. Her inner struggle matches the themes of the Beats who are seeking the pure experience of being through their music, their talk, their drugs and alcohol, their lovemaking, their travels and their poetry. She nails the paradox of a quarry that can never sit still, whether it is a person, like Kerouac, or her friend and guide into the Beat world, Elise Cowen, both of whom eventually disappear into their demons. She captures the loss of balance when counterculture is encroached upon by the mainstream. She manages to convey all this without telling, just through showing the events of her life. Johnson is wry but never bitter, she takes full responsibility for her own choices and actions. This is a book that invites the reader to share the wonder that this was all, indeed, real.
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
Enjoyable memoir
By Tom Gillis
This is an extremely well-written memoir about the college (and following) years of a young woman who happens to fall into the middle of the Beat circle in the early 1950s. The author comes off as a very sympathetic character, and, when I closed the book, I was sorry that Joyce had not continued the story for a few more years.
I was struck by how much the intellectual world has changed in the last half-century: In 1950, the cultural avante-garde could be found (almost by definition) only around some Ivy League schools (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, etc.), a couple of midwestern schools, and, I guess, Stanford & Berkeley. Today, "place" is not nearly so important.
This is a very nice book. If you've gone to the trouble of getting to this page, you ought to take the next step and read the book; you won't be disapppointed (although you may continue to wonder just why the beatniks faded away in the early 60s).
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
Essential reading
By A Customer
As a long-time reader of Beat literature, and as a man, I must say that Joyce Johnson's take on those heady, wine soaked days of poetry and madness is absolutely as good and as necessary as anything Kerouac or Ginsberg or any of the more famous (male) crew ever wrote. For my money it's right up there with On the Road.
I guess I've read this book three or four times now and it never gets old.
I also recommend Ms. Johnson's novel, In the Night Cafe, another skillful invocation of the Beat period.
See all 34 customer reviews...
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