Joyce Johnson (author)

Joyce Johnson is an American author of fiction and nonfiction, whose writing has been closely associated with the Beat Generation. She was also a child actress and appeared in the Broadway production of I Remember Mama, which she went on to write about in her 2004 memoir Missing Men.

She was born Joyce Glassman in 1935 to a Jewish family in New York and raised in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, a few blocks from the apartment of Joan Vollmer Adams where William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac lived from 1944 to 1946. Johnson was brought up in an unconventional manner for the time. One example is her mother who at 19 was continually moving from one place to another in her family's efforts to help her gain better marital prospects. As she said in the County College of Morris's Legacy Project Forum on Women of the Beat Generation being exposed to many various situations growing up, she believes that that is why she learned not to be dependent on anyone. Like her mother, she went to an all-girls high school and women's college.

At 13, she began spending time in Washington Square Park, a nexus of the era's bohemian and folk-music culture. She attended Barnard College at 16. She found that most of the students attending Barnard College were middle-class women sent there by their family to find a good husband. Some of these women rebelled against that being their sole reason to attend school and moved from social expectations to build their own identity as independent women. This led to Johnson's advocacy for women as individuals rather than just wife-material.

Johnson revealed in her book, Door Wide Open that when she was born, her mother wanted her to be a prodigy. One of her mother's dreams, when she was young, was to be a concert singer and she pushed Johnson to follow a musical path. Growing up into her teen years, her mother prepared for Johnson's breakthrough by enrolling her into multiple expensive training of writing musical comedies, she was trained to write and compose her own music and scripts. While Johnson carried on writing musical comedies for her mother, she also wrote stories that she would not dare bring home or let her mother read. One story was published in the Barnard Literary magazine about Johnson's strained relationship with her family.

Johnson recalled living a double life until she was eighteen, during that time she was in a relationship with a Barnard instructor named Donald Cook who was ten years her senior and was also Lucien Carr’s and Allen Ginsberg's Columbia classmate. From her relationship with Cook, she was introduced to Carl Solomon, Burroughs and Ginsberg. Ginsberg and Johnson met at Cook's apartment when she was 16, and from here began her friendship with Ginsberg.

In 1955, Johnson was convinced that her relationship with Cook would lead them to marriage once she got out from her parents’ house. However, she ended up living in a maid's room in an apartment near Columbia and worked a secretarial job where she was paid fifty dollars a week to get by on her own though it wasn't enough. Her relationship with Cook did not turn for the better as he distanced himself from her and eventually left her to be with another Barnard student.

At Barnard College, 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, Come and Join the Dance, which was sold to Random House when she was 21 and was published five years later in 1962 just as she was starting her career as a book editor. Her relationship with Jack Kerouac was a rather significant phase in her life.  

"I have to say that one of the rare men who very actively encouraged me in my writing was Jack Kerouac"