Bessie Head

Joyce Johnson was born in 1935. At the age of eight her family moved to Manhattan, to an apartment that landed her in the middle of the Beat Movement at an early age. Her parents wanted her to be a librettist, but she only ever had half her mind on the music. At the age of 16, she was accepted to Barnard College. There she befriended Elise Cowan, Allen Ginsberg's supposed girlfriend. The two became close friends, and Cowan introduced her to the literary world of the Beat Movement. After a huge fight with her family over abandoning her music, Johnson left home.

Ginsberg introduced Johnson to Jack Kerouac in January of 1957, an introduction that would change her life and her career forever. She published her first novel Come and Join the Dance at the age of 26, four years after her and Kerouac went their separate ways. Long after their separation, she published Minor Characters a book about her life in the Beat Movement and her romance with Jack Kerouac, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography in 1983. Her other works include Bad Connections, In the Night Café, Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958, and Missing Men. In 1983, she became a faculty member of the graduate writing program at Columbia University.

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