The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac,

[alice wellintown]

Joyce Johnson’s new biography of Beat writer Jack Kerouac vies for
room on a crowded shelf. Over the years, the literary industry
surrounding Kerouac has produced several gems, among them Johnson’s
own 1983 memoir, Minor Characters (winner of the National Book Critics
Circle Award), which chronicled her affair with Kerouac and the lives
of the other women who hitched themselves to the Beats—all the while
holding down jobs, warming up pea soup, emptying ashtrays, suffering
indifferent sex, and patiently awaiting the return of their wayward
men. Part of the charm of Minor Characters was Johnson’s
acknowledgment of how young and out of her depth she had been, a point
made even more painfully clear in her letters to Kerouac, collected in
Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957–1958.

Yet, with so much already said about Kerouac, Johnson’s latest effort
struggles to justify itself.

http://theamericanscholar.org/kerouac-in-his-own-words/