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Loading... Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir (edition 1999)by Joyce Johnson
Work detailsMinor Characters: A Beat Memoir by Joyce Johnson
None. great story in nice dark print! (  ) mahallett | Feb 13, 2013 |  I bought this book not knowing what to expect. I knew very little of Joyce Johnson and I guess I thought this book would be a tale of she dated the most famous writer of the Beat Generation and it was claim to fame. Boy, was I wrong. Joyce Johnson talks about so much more than Jack Kerouac that if she had left him out of the book it would still have been a great memoir. There are not many books I read that I wish had another 200 or more pages to go through, but this is one time that I think the book should have been longer. Joyce Johnson is an absolutely wonderful, lyrical, gifted writer. She makes you care about each person in the book. I actually found myself upset when she tells of best friend Elise's suicide. It was easy to imagine as if she were my friend as well, she is described in detail by Joyce. Joyce's sequel to this book Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters is just as good, and so is her second memoir Missing Men. But I think this is her masterpiece. ( )1  elliottrainbow | Oct 12, 2009 | A riveting account of what it was like to be female in the fifties when women were considered secondary kinds of people who existed only to service and wait on the men. I remember trying to read On the Road forty-plus years ago and putting it aside because it seemed, at the time, nearly unreadable. Joyce's account of her own life uses small excerpts from Kerouac's books. If they are representative, then I'd probably still find him unreadable. I guess I don't get it. But Johnson's own writing style and her personal story are extremely readable - and interesting. I'm on her side. Her comment near the end of the book about what the beat poets and writers were all about seems to sum it up nicely: "I think it was about the right to remain children." This is an excellent book about the Beats, from a woman who was there and who tried to love Jack Kerouac, who was, as it turned out, incapable of returning love. Wise, sad, and eloquent. ( ) TimBazzett | Apr 26, 2009 | no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0140283579, Paperback)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 (retrieved from Amazon Wed, 20 Apr 2011 05:05:46 -0400) No library descriptions found. |
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