Joyce Johnson

Joyce Johnson
Johnson at the 2007 Brooklyn Book Festival
Born	Joyce Glassman 1935 Queens, New York, United States
Occupation	Author
Nationality	American
Notable work(s)	Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958

Joyce Johnson (born 1935) is an American author of fiction and nonfiction who won a National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir Minor Characters about her relationship with Jack Kerouac.

Personal life

Born Joyce Glassman to a Jewish family in [Brooklyn], New York, Joyce was raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a few blocks from the apartment of [Joan Vollmer Adams] where [William Burroughs, [Allen Ginsberg]and [Jack Kerouac] lived from 1944-46. She was a child actress and appeared in the Broadway production of [italics] [I Remember Mama], which she writes about in her 2004 memoir [italics] [Missing Men].

At the age of 13, Joyce rebelled against her controlling parents and began hanging out in Washington Square. She matriculated at Barnard College at 16, failing her graduation by one class. It was at Barnard that 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, which was sold to Random House when she was only twenty-one and appeared five years later in 1962 just as she was starting her long career as a book editor.

Joyce 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

Jerry Yulsman's photograph of Joyce Johnson and Jack Kerouac outside the Kettle of Fish Bar in Greenwich Village during the 1950s.

Johnson's 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 has written several novels, including Come and Join the Dance (1961) and Bad Connections (1978).

In Minor Characters (Houghton Mifflin, 1983) she looked back at the years 1957 and 1958, the time when Kerouac rose from obscurity to fame with the publication of On the Road. Johnson brought attention to the experiences of women associated with the Beat Generation writers. Other memoirs and anthologies have since been published by and about women of the Beat Generation.

Since 1983 she has taught writing, primarily at Columbia University's MFA program, but also at the Breadloaf Writers Conference, the University of Vermont and New York University. "The Children's Wing," the penultimate chapter of her novel In The Night Cafe (1989), was a first-prize O. Henry Award recipient. In 1992 she received an NEA grant.

The Johnson and Kerouac correspondence, collected in Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958 (2000) was followed by another memoir, Missing Men (2004).

Bibliography

• Come and join the dance. Atheneum. 1962. http://books.google.com/books?id=V9vPAAAAMAAJ. Retrieved 10 September 2011.  (as Joyce Glassman)
• Bad connections. Putnam. 1978. ISBN ISBN 0-39-912122-6. http://books.google.com/books?id=w-ewAAAAIAAJ. Retrieved 10 September 2011. 
• Minor Characters: a young woman's coming-of-age in the beat orbit of Jack Kerouac. Penguin. 1 July 1999. ISBN 978-0-14-028357-0. 
• In the Night Café. Fontana. 31 May 1990. ISBN 978-0-00-654282-7. http://books.google.com/books?id=GB4zptLqdRQC. Retrieved 10 September 2011. 
• What Lisa knew: the truths and lies of the Steinberg case. Kensington. 1 April 1991. ISBN 978-0-8217-3387-5. http://books.google.com/books?id=j-P-puJZPmYC. Retrieved 10 September 2011. 
• Jack Kerouac; Joyce Johnson (2000). Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958. Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-89040-8. 
• Missing Men: A Memoir. Penguin. 5 July 2005. ISBN 978-0-14-303523-7. http://books.google.com/books?id=7qORmUXXAFwC. Retrieved 10 September 2011. 

External links

• 10/2007 UK Guardian interview with Johnson and her own development through 50s
• 2007 Vanity Fair article by Johnson about Kerouac and the Beats
• Critical Mass: Interview with Joyce Johnson (August 20, 2007)
• Artful Dodge: 1999 interview with Joyce Johnson