Born Joyce Glassman to a Jewish family in New York City, she was 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. She was a child actress and appeared in the Broadway production of I Remember Mama, which she writes about in her 2004 memoir Missing Men. 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. There she became friends with Elise Cowen 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 long career as a book editor. She 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
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. In her memoir Minor Characters, the book for which she is best known, Johnson reflects on her adolescence and college years, as well as on the 1957 and 1958 period when Kerouac rose from obscurity to fame following the publication of his novel On the Road. The book brought attention to the experiences of women associated with the Beat Generation writers. It won a 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award. Johnson has published three novels: Come and Join the Dance , Bad Connections, and In the Night Cafe. Come and Join the Dance has been recognized by scholars such as Ann Douglas, Nancy Grace and Ronna Johnson as the first Beat novel by a woman. She has also published a work of investigative journalism: What Lisa Knew: The Truths and Lies of the Steinberg Case. From 1983 through 1997, she taught writing at Columbia University's MFA program. She has also taught at the New School, the Breadloaf Writers Conference, the University of Vermont and New York University, and at the 92nd Street YMHA. "The Children's Wing," the penultimate chapter of her novel In The Night Cafe, 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, was followed by another memoir, Missing Men. In 2012, she published her biography of Kerouac The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac. Though some critics have erroneously called this book a memoir, Johnson ends Kerouac's story six years before she met him, and makes only a few relevant references to the relationship they had from January 1957 through October 1958.
