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:
“To minor authors is left the ornamentation of the commonplace: these do not bother about any reinventing of the world; they merely try to squeeze the best they can out of a given order of things, out of traditional patterns of fiction.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light.... They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters are they! We never learned meanness of them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)