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:
“There are acacias, a graceful species amusingly devitalized by sentimentality, this kind drooping its leaves with the grace of a young widow bowed in controllable grief, this one obscuring them with a smooth silver as of placid tears. They please, like the minor French novelists of the eighteenth century, by suggesting a universe in which nothing cuts deep.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“To marry a man out of pity is folly; and, if you think you are going to influence the kind of fellow who has “never had a chance, poor devil,” you are profoundly mistaken. One can only influence the strong characters in life, not the weak; and it is the height of vanity to suppose that you can make an honest man of anyone.”
—Margot Asquith (1864–1945)