January 1957: girl meets boy on a blind date arranged by Allen Ginsberg. The girl was Joyce Johnson, the boy Jack Kerouac, and it was nine months before 'On The Road' became a permanent part of the American vocabulary. But like Robin Hood's and Peter Pan's, Jack's was a boy gang. Women were minor characters at best, though they risked much more to live as freely as the rebels they loved. Tender, observant and beautifully written, Joyce Johnson's award-winning 'Minor Characters' is both a personal memoir and an unforgettable portrait of that whole, near-mythical, generation: the Beats.
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A Beat Memoir. Astonishing insider account of the Beat generation by Jack Kerouacs lover and probably the best book ever written about the Beats.
What Joyce Johnson is doing here, then, is several things. Sure, she’s writing a memoir of the ’50s, the ‘Beat Generation’ and Kerouac in particular . . . But she’s also writing her own biography and summation of the times . . . taking these two themes, she merges them into the idea of ‘minor characters,’ those people who live just as intensely or more so than those who are defining ‘what’s going on,’ but who still, under these inaccurate definitions, come in as minor characters . . . a tender, sweet intelligent book. Carolyn See, Los Angeles Times; [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. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times; Joyce Johnson hands over to us the safe-deposit box that contains the lost, precious scrolls of the New York ’50s. Seymour Krim, The Washington Post; MINOR CHARACTERS is an avowedly nostalgic portrait that captures the excitement, the strangeness and the often misdirected and destructive energy of those lost days. The Philadelphia Enquirer; The love story of Joyce from the upper westside who journeys to the village on the subway, putting on a pair of copper earrings en route, and Jack, the confused, mother-tied, suddenly famous road poet from Lowell, Massachusetts . . . a first-rate memoir, very beautiful, very sad. . . E. L. Doctorow; Johnson, who was living with Kerouac when the novel that made him famous came out, has given us in Minor Characters a dispassionate portrait of a time that has since become a literary myth . . . at once forgiving and wry. James Atlas, The Atlantic; Tender and complex . . . far more than a simple enumeration of the highs and lows of an underground romance with Jack Kerouac . . . her book becomes a moving story of adolescent rebellion, and then a fascinating meditation on the relations between the sexes by one who in her Bohemian youth took a measure of freedom unthinkable to most women of her time. The Boston Globe; [A] lovely, poignant memoir . . . Minor Characters glows with affection. Todd Gitlin, The Nation; Realistic rather than flamboyant, Johnson succeeds in portraying the Beats not as oddities or celebrities but as individuals. In wry retrospect, she recognizes the folly of young women rebelling against their well-meaning parents only to become subservient to indifferent men. The New Yorker; Joyce Johnson does much more than add her personal memoir to the history of the Beats . . . Her honest story illuminates a classic pattern of feminine ambivalence, blurred direction and girlish dreams. Susan Brownmiller; A beautifully written venture into iconoclasm. Now, realer heroines emerge as Beat gods fall, along with all the strutting princes of literature. Sol Yurick; With a style balanced between lyricism and forceful clarity, Joyce Johnson has become one of our premier memoirists. O, The Oprah Magazine; Joyce Johnson summons up the mythic Greenwich Village of jazz, poetry and black-stockinged Bohemia with infinite ironic grace. She was, briefly, a muse for all those messy Beat angels. This is the muse’s side of the story. It turns out the muse could write as well as anybody. Angela Carter; An open, perfect memoir: the one to read when you think you are tired of memoirs: the one to study when you think you might write one. It’s here. In print and every word is right. Jill Robinson; Rich and beautifully written, full of vivid portraits and evocations . . . of the major Beat voices and the minor characters, their women San Francisco Chronicle; A major literary event, describing with a rare blend of intelligence and grace the difficult process of becoming, in Doris Lessing’s words, a “free woman.” Ann Charters
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780413777157
Publisert
2012-06-21
Utgave
2. utgave
Utgiver
Vendor
Methuen Publishing Ltd
Høyde
198 mm
Bredde
129 mm
Dybde
21 mm
Aldersnivå
G, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
288

Biographical note

Joyce Johnson is the author of three novels including In the Night Café and Bad Connections, hailed by E. L. Doctorow as a “sad, beautiful casebook of unrequited love, unrequited humanity.” Her other hooks include Missing Men: A Memoir and Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957–58 (with Jack Kerouac). She lives in New York City.