Joyce Johnson is an American author of fiction and nonfiction, whose writing has been closely associated with the Beat Generation. She was also a child actress and appeared in the Broadway production of I Remember Mama, which she went on to write about in her 2004 memoir Missing Men.
Personal life She was born Joyce Glassman in 1935 to a Jewish family in New York 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. Johnson was brought up in an unconventional manner for the time. One example is 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 why she learned not to be dependent on anyone. Like her mother, she went to an all-girls high school and women's college.
At 13, she began spending time in Washington Square Park, a nexus of the era's bohemian and folk-music culture. She attended Barnard College at 16. She found that most of the students attending Barnard College were middle-class women sent there by their family to find a good husband. Some of these women rebelled against that being their sole reason to attend school and moved from social expectations to build their own identity as independent women. This led to Johnson's advocacy for women as individuals rather than just wife-material.
Johnson revealed in her book, Door Wide Open that when she was born, her mother wanted her to be a prodigy. One of her mother's dreams, when she was young, was to be a concert singer and she pushed Johnson to follow a musical path. Growing up into her teen years, her mother prepared for Johnson's breakthrough by enrolling her into multiple expensive training of writing musical comedies, she was trained to write and compose her own music and scripts. While Johnson carried on writing musical comedies for her mother, she also wrote stories that she would not dare bring home or let her mother read. One story was published in the Barnard Literary magazine about Johnson's strained relationship with her family.
Johnson recalled living a double life until she was eighteen, during that time she was in a relationship with a Barnard instructor named Donald Cook who was ten years her senior and was also Lucien Carr’s and Allen Ginsberg's Columbia classmate. From her relationship with Cook, she was introduced to Carl Solomon, Burroughs and Ginsberg. Ginsberg and Johnson met at Cook's apartment when she was 16, and from here began her friendship with Ginsberg.
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.
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. "I have to say that one of the rare men who very actively encouraged me in my writing was Jack Kerouac"Among the reasons why it was a significant phase for Johnson is through her above statement in which she acknowledges the fact that it was her relationship with Kerouac that led her to have her writing career success because he supported her to venture out in the literature. During her relationship with Kerouac, she realised that men simply saw women as material for their writing, and as sexual objects, not as individuals. Johnson believes this realization of the Beat women paved the way for women's liberation of that time, sparking the urge for them to be more than just minor characters.
After her break up with Jack Kerouac, she was married briefly to abstract painter James Johnson, who was killed in a motorcycle accident. From her second marriage to painter Peter Pinchbeck, which ended in divorce, came her son, Daniel Pinchbeck, also an author.
Career 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.
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 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 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.
Style of Writing
Non-fiction 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.
With regards to the style of writing, Joyce Johnson had her own way to express her thoughts in writing. It can be seen that she is meticulous in her work because she wants to give the best reading experience to the readers. Joyce Johnson's main concern in the process of writing is the structure rather than the theme in her literary works. This means that she needs a proper plan to organise the ideas in her works. Thus, her style of writing varies from the other Beat writers who are commonly associated with the notion of spontaneous writing.
Besides that, Joyce Johnson used descriptive and narrative styles to write about her life stories which include characters, settings and conflicts. These writing styles can be regarded as the most effective way for her to describe the events in details based on her personal experience. She had to be selective in choosing particular events to be included in her literary work. This can be seen in the interview with Nancy Grace:For example, I could have put in everything that happened to me during the years that I was writing about, but there was a lot of stuff I simply left out because I wanted to have a focus. For example, the fact that when I was a child I was in the theater. Well, that was very interesting, but it would have taken me away from what I was really writing about, so I didn't put that material inBased on this interview, it can be inferred that writing a memoir is not an easy task because the writer had to recall specific events to avoid any fabrication. It illustrates that Joyce Johnson wants her readers to experience her life and comprehend the message through her writing. Therefore, this kind of exposure helps to fashion their understanding regarding her life as a female writer and Beat Movement in the twentieth century.
Fiction