Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir (1987) is a memoir by Joyce Johnson documenting her time and affair with Jack Kerouac providing a very intimate biography of sorts for the man, along with commentary on Allen Ginsberg, among others. The book also tells the story of women of the Beat generation, the "minor characters" of its title.
The book won a National Book Critics Circle Award.
Famous quotes containing the words minor and/or characters:
“Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partizans, and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—
which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”
—Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)