Joyce Johnson's eight books include the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award winner Minor Characters, the recent memoir Missing Men, the novel In the Night Cafe, and Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters 1957-1958 (with Jack Kerouac). She has written for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and lives in New York City.
"This is the muse's side of the story. It turns out the muse
could write as well as anybody."
–Angela Carter
“This little known Beat Generation memoir uncovers the hidden
female characters who played pivotal roles in the progression of
the 1950’s literary movement. One can imagine how Hannah’s
bookish heart beats to the drum of figures like Edie Parker and
Elise Cowen and Joyce Johnson.”
– Lena Dunham
“Rich and beautifully written, full of vivid portraits and
evocations of the major Beat voices and the minor characters, their
women.”
--Anne Lamott, The San Francisco Chronicle
"A first-rate memoir, very beautiful, very sad."
--E.L. Doctorow
“Minor Characters is, in its quiet but deliberate way, among the
great American literary memoirs of the past century . . . [It] is
not just about the Beats . . . in part it’s a portrait of Johnson’s
cloistered middle-class childhood on the Upper West Side. . .Best
of all, perhaps, this book charts Johnson’s own career as a budding
writer . . .it’s a book about a so-called minor character who, in
the process of writing her life, became a major one.”
– Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review
"Joyce Johnson hands over to us the safe-deposit box that contains
lost, precious scrolls of the New York '50s."
--The Washington Post
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