Joyce Johnson (author)

In 2000, she published a memoir Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters. It is a collection of letters of their love affairs written by her and Kerouac from 1957 to 1958. It was followed by publication of another memoir, Missing Men, in 2004. After four years publishing her work, she signed a contract with her publisher Viking/Penguin for a Jack Kerouac biography entitled The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac in 2008. It took four years for her to publish the memoir, which she explained was delayed due to issues accessing the Kerouac archive which was acquired by Berg Collection. Further, Kerouac Estate policies limited access of his papers only to the authorized biographers.

In 1990, exactly 28 years after the publication of her first novel, she published an analytical journalism work entitled What Lisa Knew: The Truths and Lies of the Steinberg Case. The journal revolved around psychological, sexual and social forces. Her work fiction and articles have appeared in Harper's, Harper's Bazaar, New York, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and The Washington Post. She was an editor at William Morrow, The Dial Press, McGraw-Hill and The Atlantic Monthly Press. After leaving publishing, she wrote for periodicals including Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, New York, Harper's Bazaar, Mirabella, and Harper's. From 1983 to 1997, she taught writing at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, The University of Vermont, New York University and primarily at Columbia University’s MFA program.

From the period, her best-known work is her memoir entitled Minor Characters won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983. Then in 1987, her penultimate chapter from her novel In the Night Cafe, which is ″The Children's Wing″ won the first prize in the O. Henry Award. Also, she received an award or grant from The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in 1992.

In general, the memoirs by Joyce Johnson comprise insights regarding her personal experience, memories, and identity. She had written four memoirs which are Minor Characters, Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, Missing Men: A Memoir and The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac that were published in 1983, 2000, 2004 and 2012 respectively. It can be seen that her life experiences as a female writer and the relationship with Jack Kerouac have been written in these memoirs.

Nevertheless, Johnson captures this period of her relationship in her memoir Minor Characters in 1983 which then boosts her career as a writer. In one of her interviews, Johnson said that she never imagined herself writing non-fiction things. However, Minor Characters makes her feel satisfied to write something that comes directly from life which was totally different from writing fiction stories. Undoubtedly, real-life does have a lot of surprise and unpredictability in it. By writing the memoir, Johnson wanted to discover and make sense of the events that occur during her past days.

Sixteen years later, Johnson produced her second fiction novel in 1978, Bad Connections and further wrote another fiction title, In the Night Cafe (1987). Both novels capture the bohemian culture in the 1960s with more highlights on the emotions of the female characters in facing struggles as Beat women. According to Johnson in the same interview, she considered In the Night Cafe as her best book and stated how reading Henry James's novels has influenced her to write fiction.

At Barnard College, she became friends with Elise Cowen (briefly Allen Ginsberg's lover) who introduced her to the Beat circle. 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 21 and was published five years later in 1962 just as she was starting her career as a book editor. Her relationship with Jack Kerouac was a rather significant phase in her life.

Most of Johnson's novels highlighted an issue about women's status in society and their limitation of experience because of their gender as a woman. The woman was perceived as misfits, rebels and sinful creatures who could not be controlled. Thus, these issues have driven Johnson to produce her debut novel Come and Join the Dance in 1962. The book was published before the Beatnik movement became a widespread cultural phenomenon and has been recognised as the first Beat novel written by a woman. Other than Come and Join the Dance, she has also published other novels like Bad Connections in 1978 and In the Night Cafe in 1987. These novels have a similar theme where they highlighted the life of women in 1950 and 60s.

Apart from memoirs and autobiographies, Joyce Johnson also wrote fiction novels. Her writing debut in 1962, Come and Join the Dance is a fiction written a year earlier before her encounter with Kerouac. The storyline wraps up in the hustle and chaos of the Beat movement in 1955, where it highlights the story of a rebellious young female college student who possesses the qualities most Beat men have- to be adventurous, carefree and sexually active. Despite it challenges the orthodox femininity ideas of that time, Johnson affirms that she wrote based on real situations that the women she knew were living life, far from conforming to their gender expectations. In an interview with Nancy Grace in May 1999, Johnson admitted that Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters has been a great influence for her to write that kind of story. She deemed to be constantly worried about writing it at the beginning.

In the first month of 1957, Johnson met Jack Kerouac on a blind date arranged by Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac encouraged Johnson to write her first book in 1962. However, their love affair lasted only two years and led her in writing a memoir entitled Minor Characters which was published in 1983. The memoir reflects on her life between 1957 and 1958, especially about her relationship with Kerouac. It also highlighted Kerouac who rose from obscurity to fame following the publication of his novel On the Road in 1957. Further, it also reflected on herself turning back from middle-class life where her parents want her to be a composer. However, she wanted to become a poet and musician; thus, she began to escape and sneak out to Washington Square Park to chase her dream. This memoir has brought attention to the contents, personal life, career experiences of women associated with the Beat Generation writers.

In 1955, Johnson was convinced that her relationship with Cook would lead them to marriage once she got out from her parents’ house. However, she ended up living in a maid's room in an apartment near Columbia and worked a secretarial job where she was paid fifty dollars a week to get by on her own though it wasn't enough. Her relationship with Cook did not turn for the better as he distanced himself from her and eventually left her to be with another Barnard student.

Living in the heart of the 1950s' Beat Movement, her works are very significant in portraying the life of women during the era where most of the time, women's voices were backgrounded in the stories written by the Beat male authors like Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac. Therefore, Johnson decides to offer the readers an insight into the identity of women in the movement despite typically being excluded. Johnson perceives herself merely as the observer of the movement she engaged in as a way to empower herself where she can make commentaries about it but at the same time not becoming too attached to it. She mentioned in one of her memoirs:

Three of her novels, Come and Join the Dance, Bad Connections, and In the Night Café portrayed a similar theme which was cultural and gender discourses. These novels successfully displayed the adventure of the middle-class white women particularly in the 1950s and 1960s. The issue on feminism is heavily touched on all of her three novels particularly on Bad Connections, published in 1978. It is interesting to note that although the novel has been out of prints for many years and lacking a thorough analysis from academicians, the context of the story in the novel offers valued definition on the zeitgeist of the 1950s and 1960s as well as the thinking of one of the women who revolved around the Beat Movement. As Johnson's writings are set in the context of American counterculture, where culture with values and norms of behaviour contrast from those of conventional society, they follow the pattern where the female protagonist is set to face with an amount number of difficulties in order to acquire the liberty of freeing herself from the life that traditionally is laid out for women.

The way Johnson was brought up was quite unconventional and different from other girls her age in the 1940s and 1950s. She grew up most her life witnessing the women in her life face many struggles in life trying to find purpose. An example would be her mother who at 19 was continually moving from one place to another in her family's efforts to help her gain better marital prospects. As she said in the County College of Morris's Legacy Project Forum on Women of the Beat Generation being exposed to many various situations growing up, she believes that that is the reason why she learned not to be dependent on anyone. Just like her mother, she went to an all-girls high school and women's college.

Joyce Johnson is an American author of fiction and nonfiction. She was born Joyce Glassman in 1935 to a Jewish family in New York City and raised in the Morningside Heights neighborhood 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. 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.