Minor Characters

Description

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner

During the charmed years of the late Fifties, as a cultural revolution blossomed in downtown New York, Joyce Johnson was part of an extraordinary circle that included Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi and Hettie Jones, Gregory Corso, Robert Frank, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline. Twenty-one-year-old Johnson was living with Kerouac when he
became famous overnight in September of 1957 with the publication of On the Road. Minor Characters starts as a moving story of adolescent rebellion, and then becomes a fascinating meditation on the relations between the sexes.

[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.”

A first-rate memoir, very beautiful, very sad.”

Rich and beautifully written, full of vivid portraits and evocations of the major Beat voices and the minor characters, their
women.”