Joyce Johnson was born in 1935 in New York City, the setting for all her fiction: Come and Join the Dance, recognized as the first Beat novel by a woman writer, Bad Connections, and In the Night Café. She is best known for her memoir Minor Characters, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 and dealt with coming of age in the 1950s and with her involvement with Jack Kerouac. She has published two other Beat-related books: Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, and The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac. She has also written a second memoir, Missing Men, and the nonfiction title What Lisa Knew: The Truths and Lies of the Steinberg Case.
