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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