She was born Joyce Glassman in 1935 to a Jewish family in New York City[1] and raised in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, a few blocks from the apartment of Joan Vollmer Adams where William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac lived from 1944 to 1946.

[2] As she said in the County College of Morris's Legacy Project Forum on Women of the Beat Generation[3] being exposed to many various situations growing up, she believes that that is why she learned not to be dependent on anyone.

[4] Johnson recalled living a double life until she was eighteen, during that time she was in a relationship with a Barnard instructor named Donald Cook who was ten years her senior and was also Lucien Carr’s and Allen Ginsberg's Columbia classmate.

However, she ended up living in a maid's room in an apartment near Columbia and worked a secretarial job where she was paid fifty dollars a week to get by on her own though it wasn't enough.

Ginsberg arranged for Glassman and Kerouac to meet on a blind date while she was working on her first novel, Come and Join the Dance, which was sold to Random House when she was 21 and was published five years later in 1962 just as she was starting her career as a book editor.

[5] The book was published before the Beatnik movement became a widespread cultural phenomenon and has been recognised as the first Beat novel written by a woman.

This memoir has brought attention to the contents, personal life, career experiences of women associated with the Beat Generation writers.

[7] In 1990, exactly 28 years after the publication of her first novel, she published an analytical journalism work entitled What Lisa Knew: The Truths and Lies of the Steinberg Case.

[9] From the period, her best-known work is her memoir entitled Minor Characters won the National Book Critics Circle Award[10] in 1983.

It took four years for her to publish the memoir, which she explained was delayed due to issues accessing the Kerouac archive which was acquired by Berg Collection.

Besides that, Joyce Johnson used descriptive and narrative styles to write about her life stories which include characters, settings and conflicts.

This can be seen in the interview with Nancy Grace:For example, I could have put in everything that happened to me during the years that I was writing about, but there was a lot of stuff I simply left out because I wanted to have a focus.

Therefore, this kind of exposure helps to fashion their understanding regarding her life as a female writer and Beat Movement in the twentieth century.

Despite it challenges the orthodox femininity ideas of that time, Johnson affirms that she wrote based on real situations that the women she knew were living life, far from conforming to their gender expectations.

[13] In an interview with Nancy Grace in May 1999, Johnson admitted that Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters has been a great influence for her to write that kind of story.

Both novels capture the bohemian culture in the 1960s with more highlights on the emotions of the female characters in facing struggles as Beat women.

[13] According to Johnson in the same interview, she considered In the Night Cafe as her best book and stated how reading Henry James's novels has influenced her to write fiction.

Her relationship with novelist Jack Kerouac helped shape her identity as a writer as he supported her in her early writing career.

You may play as much a part in the group as you wish, but when you are drawn in a little too tightly, you can always say 'Well after all, I'm just an observer,' and step back into safety again[1]Joyce was concerned with women's movement during the time and was glad that her works received recognition as a woman author of Beat Generation.

All of her literary works play a role in dispelling the silence that is commonly attributed to the female character in post-war literature.

[15] Being one of the few women that managed to find her way to the top of the Beat Movement, Johnson uses this opportunity as a medium in sharing her experiences living as a woman who drifted away from reaching the path of conventionality in her literary works.

[12]Three of her novels, Come and Join the Dance, Bad Connections, and In the Night Café portrayed a similar theme which was cultural and gender discourses.

[15] As Johnson's writings are set in the context of American counterculture, where culture with values and norms of behaviour contrast from those of conventional society, they follow the pattern where the female protagonist is set to face with an amount number of difficulties in order to acquire the liberty of freeing herself from the life that traditionally is laid out for women.

[17]That is, the novel instantiates rules, customs, and convictions of the Beat generation for women, but critiques them by reversing the status of the sexes, even while preserving the binary, hierarchic structure of the gender system.

These three novels form a trilogy spanning Johnson's life in hipster and hippie New York and critique Beat as well as sixties countercultures and discourses.

[18]By taking that into consideration, her portrayal of women in her writings opens a new way of looking at how a woman, infused with the ideas of this movement, represents a female protagonist in large part on the margin of the rapidly developing American society.

[2] It is also interesting to note that Johnson's point of view on life was without doubt influenced by Kerouac and the Beats in relation to their shared attitudes towards women.

By this, it shows how Johnson decides to foreground a woman and ultimately parted away from the uniform and shallow depiction of women by male Beat writers.

She successfully showcased the misperceptions and conflicts surrounding the white, middle-class female protagonist in a rigid patriarchal society.

With their short time of intimate relationship, Johnson used all her knowledge about Kerouac to shape her point of view when she was writing The Voice Is All.