As the months passed, I wasn’t surprised to discover she was much more than a mere footnote to William’s story. She was a vibrant, creative spirit. In the 1940s, she curated community in her Upper West Side apartment in Manhattan and led all-night discussions that laid the groundwork for the Beat Generation’s hallmark characteristics: social freedom and spontaneous literary composition. She introduced Jack Kerouac to Marcel Proust and William Burroughs to the Mayan Codices, and, through her eventual descent into addiction, partially inspired Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. The Beat Generation was as much a cultural movement as a literary one, and through her sexual fluidity and refusal to submit to socially prescribed female timidity, Joan inspired women to become “Beat.”
Again and again, I wondered why no one had bothered to write about her, beyond her relationship to William or the mythology of her death.
—Katie Bennett