Publishers Weekly | 14 Σεπτεμβρίου 2012 »»
Joyce Johnson reflects on 50 years of being around Kerouac and his work as she returns to the writer and relationship she wrote about in her award-winning memoir, Minor Characters, this time in The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac.
Another Kerouac biography? I asked myself sternly, but the urge to finally write my own had seized me and wouldn’t go away. It was 2007, fifty years after the publication of On the Road and the love affair I’d written about in my 1983 memoir Minor Characters. At the time Jack took up with me, I’d been a publishing secretary by day and a black-stockinged bohemian by night with enough leftover energy to sit up at my Royal portable rewriting the sentences of my first novel long after I should have gone to sleep. Now I was 72, wondering how hard it would be to lug my PC back and forth to the New York Public Library, for after four decades of being inaccessible to Kerouac scholars, Jack’s huge archive had landed in the Berg Collection and scholars could now find out what was in his unpublished papers, despite severe restrictions on how much could be quoted.