Ronna C. Johnson | |
---|---|
Occupation | Professor of English |
Academic background | |
Education | PhD |
Alma mater | Tufts University |
Academic work | |
Discipline | English Literature, Beat Generation Studies |
Institutions | Tufts University |
Notable works | “Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation,” “Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Beat Women Writers" |
Ronna C. Johnson is a Professor of English at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Johnson is an established authority on the Beat Generation. She has worked as a fiction editor for ASPECT magazine, Zephyr Press, and Dark Horse magazine. [1] She is also the co-editor of the Journal of Beat Studies published by Pace University Press, [2] a founding board member of the Beat Studies Association, [3] and the co-editor of the Beat Studies book series published by Clemson University Press/Liverpool University Press. [4]
Johnson received her B.A. from Boston University College of Arts and Sciences, graduating Magna cum Laude. She then went on to receive her M.A. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She received her Ph.D. from Tufts University, and in 1984 was nominated for the University Microfilms International Distinguished Dissertation Award for her Doctoral Thesis, Jack Kerouac's Art: The Artist as Literary Hero in The Duluoz Legend. [1]
Jack Kerouac was an American novelist and poet of French-Canadian ancestry.
The Beat Generation was a literary movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized throughout the 1950s. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.
On the Road is a 1957 novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across the United States. It is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations, with its protagonists living life against a backdrop of jazz, poetry, and drug use. The novel is a roman à clef, with many key figures of the Beat movement, such as William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady represented by characters in the book, including Kerouac himself as the narrator Sal Paradise.
Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46 is a 1968 semi-autobiographical novel by Jack Kerouac. The book describes the adventures of Kerouac's alter ego, Jack Duluoz, covering the period of his life between 1935 and 1946. The book includes reminiscences of the author's high school experiences in Lowell, Massachusetts, his education at Columbia University, and his subsequent naval service during World War II. It culminates with the beginnings of the beat movement. It was the last work published before Kerouac's death in 1969.
Lenore Kandel was an American poet, affiliated with the Beat Generation and Hippie counterculture.
The Town and the City is a novel by Jack Kerouac, published by Harcourt Brace in 1950. This was the first major work published by Kerouac, who later became famous for his second novel On the Road (1957). Like all of Jack Kerouac's major works, The Town and the City is essentially an autobiographical novel, though less directly so than most of his other works. The Town and the City was written in a conventional manner over a period of years, and much more novelistic license was taken with this work than after Kerouac's adoption of quickly written "spontaneous prose". The Town and the City was written before Kerouac had developed his own style, and it is heavily influenced by Thomas Wolfe.
Joyce Johnson is an American author of fiction and nonfiction who won a National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir Minor Characters about her relationship with Jack Kerouac.
Edie Kerouac-Parker (1922–1993) was the author of the memoir You'll Be Okay, about her life with her first husband, Jack Kerouac, and the early days of the Beat Generation. While an art student under George Grosz at Columbia University, she and Barnard student and friend Joan Vollmer shared an apartment on 118th Street in New York City which came to be frequented by many of the then unknown Beats, among them Vollmer's eventual husband William S. Burroughs, and fellow Columbia students Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg as well as Lucien Carr.
Carolyn Elizabeth Robinson Cassady was an American writer and associated with the Beat Generation through her marriage to Neal Cassady and her friendships with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and other prominent Beat figures. She became a frequent character in the works of Jack Kerouac.
Elise Nada Cowen was an American poet. She was part of the Beat generation, and was close to Allen Ginsberg, one of the movement's leading figures.
Ann Charters, née Ann Ruth Danberg is a professor of American Literature at the University of Connecticut at Storrs.
Beat Generation is a play written by Jack Kerouac upon returning home to Florida after his seminal work On the Road had been published in 1957. Gerald Nicosia, a Kerouac biographer and family friend has said that theatre producer Leo Gavin suggested that Kerouac should write a play; the outcome being Beat Generation.
William "Bill" Cannastra was a member of the early Beat Generation scene in New York. He was a "wild man" figure that the writers in the group found interesting, similar to their fascination with Neal Cassady. Characters based on Bill Cannastra were included in both the John Clellon Holmes novel Go and Jack Kerouac's Visions of Cody. He is also described in Allen Ginsberg's "Howl".
Jack Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his method of spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel.
Moody Street Irregulars was an American publication dedicated to the history and the cultural influences of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation. Edited and published by Joy Walsh, it featured articles, memoirs, reviews and poetry. Published from Clarence Center, New York, it had a run of 28 issues from Winter 1978 to 1992. Some issues were edited by Walsh with Michael Basinski and Ana Pine.
Ruth Weiss is a German-born poet, but actually of Austrian citizenship, performer, playwright and artist who made her home and career in the United States, as a member of the Beat Generation, a label she has in later years embraced and that is used frequently by historians detailing her life and works.
Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation is the third and final spoken word album by the American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac, released in January 1960 on Verve Records. The album was recorded during 1959, prior to the publication of Kerouac's sixth novel, Doctor Sax.
Marianne Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.
The European Beat Studies Network (EBSN) and association (EBSN,e.V.,) is a charitable organisation and network founded in 2010 by scholars Polina Mackay and Professor Oliver Harris. It comprises an international community of scholars and students, writers and artists with an interest in the broad field of Beat culture and the writers and artists associated with the Beat Generation. It holds annual conferences and promotes research and collaboration in the field of Beat Studies and the arts. It is particularly transnational in focus, as Dr. Chad Weidner writes: 'The impetus of the European Beat Studies Network (EBSN) provides an additional forum for transnational angles into the Beats.'
Nancy McCampbell Grace is the Virginia Myers Professor of English at The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio, where she has taught since 1987. She is a specialist in the Beat Generation, with her research specifically on Jack Kerouac and women artists associated with the Beat movement.