Since 1984, she has been teaching workshops in memoir and fiction at the 92nd Street YMHA. Johnson has brought to life what history may. She has taught in the MFA programs at Columbia and the New School. Minor Characters National Book Critics Circle Award Winner, 1983 This is the muses side of the story. Until she left book publishing in 1987 to teach creative writing and to concentrate on her own work, Johnson had a long career as an editor. Its also, but less, about her friend Elise Cowen, a. Id remembered it as being more about more women but its mainly about Johnson, most interesting about her childhood and adolescence before Jack enters her life.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Johnson's Beat. So The Voice is All is casting a shadow over Minor Characters. Read 190 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Minor characters a young woman's coming-of-age in the beat orbit of Jack Kerouac 1st Anchor Books ed. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere. Minor characters by Johnson, Joyce, 1935-Publication date 1984. A writer who likes to try out different genres, she is also the author of the novels Bad Connections and In the Night Cafe, as well as Door Wide Open: A Beat Romance in Letters a second memoir Missing Men, and What Lisa Knew: The Truths and Lies of the Steinberg Case, her first foray into investigative journalism. Born in New York, the city that has been the setting for all of her eight books, she published Come and Join the Dance, now considered the first Beat novel by a woman, at the age of twenty-six.įive years earlier, in January 1957, she met Jack Kerouac on a blind date arranged by Allen Ginsberg-the beginning of a love affair that lasted for nearly two years, which she later wrote about in Minor Characters.

Best known for her memoir Minor Characters, which won a 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award, Joyce Johnson has just published The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac, in which she follows Kerouac’s development as a writer through 1951.

Minor characters by joyce johnson