The Women Behind Kerouac and Ginsberg
The Inspiration, Muses, Great Loves and Losses of the Original Beats
Sep 7, 2009
Although the Beat Generation was most famously known for its male writers, artists and poets, there was also a group of women who played a major part in the movement and the lives of these great men.
Elise Cowen
Elise Nada Cowen was born in 1933 in Long Island, New York. While attending Barnard College in the early 1950s, she became friends with Joyce Glassman.
It was during this time that Cowen was introduced to Allen Ginsberg by her philosophy professor, Alex Greer. Although Ginsberg had recently embraced his homosexuality, he began a romantic relationship with Cowen in 1953.
Although the two shared an intense intellectual connection, the relationship soon dissolved, but they remained friends. When Ginsberg became lovers with Peter Orlovsky, Cowen began a sexual relationship with a woman and, at one point, the two couples shared an apartment.
Having dealt with depression her entire life, Cowen began having severe psychological breakdowns and was admitted to Bellevue Hospital. In early 1962, she checked herself out, against doctors’ orders, and returned to her parents’ home in Washington Heights, Manhattan. It was here on Feb. 1, 1962 that Cowen committed suicide by jumping through a window and falling seven stories to the ground.
While none of her poetry was published in her lifetime, Cowen was thought to be one of the great Beat poets of the time. Her parents destroyed most of her poems and journals after her death, but 83 of her poems rested safely in her friend, Leo Skir’s, basement. Over the years, Skir has sent some of Cowen’s poetry to several literary magazines, including Evergreen Review. Also, for the book, Women of the Beat Generation, Skir provided never before published poems by Cowen.
Joyce Glassman Johnson
Joyce Glassman was born in 1935 in Queens, New York. She grew up in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, not far from the apartment of William and Joan Burroughs.
At 16, she attended Barnard College, where she became friends with Elise Cowen, who introduced her to the Beat circle. It was Ginsberg, Cowen’s then boyfriend, who urged Glassman and Kerouac to meet on a blind date in January, 1957.
Kerouac and Glassman would date for the next two years. At the time of On the Road's publication, Johnson was working on her first novel, Come and Join the Dance.
After her relationship with Kerouac ended, Glassman would go on to marry artist Jim Johnson, who died in a motorcycle accident in the early 60s, and whose name she still carries. Then she married another artist, Peter Pinchbeck, who she had a son with and later divorced.
Johnson has published three novels, Come and Join the Dance, In the Night Cafe and Bad Connections, and two memoirs, Missing Men and Minor Characters, which documents her affair with Kerouac and won a National Book Critics Circle Award.
These great women, along with Edie Parker, Joan Vollmer and Carolyn Cassady, were at the centre of the beat movement. Although mostly unknown in the 40s and 50s, each would each go on to be known as prominent beat poets and artists.
