Girls Who Wore Black - by Ronna C Johnson (Paperback)

About the Book

The contributors to this volume attempt to fill the gap in critical consideration of women writers of the Beat Generation and evaluate their lives and literary output, helping the reader appreciate their unique, diverse voices during a dynamic moment of profound cultural change.

Book Synopsis

What do we know about the women who played an important role in creating the literature of the Beat Generation? Until recently, very little. Studies of the movement have effaced or excluded women writers, such as Elise Cowen, Joyce Johnson, Joanne Kyger, Hettie Jones, and Diane Di Prima, each one a significant figure of the postwar Beat communities. Equally free-thinking and innovative as the founding generation of men, women writers, fluent in Beat, hippie, and women's movement idioms, partook of and bridged two important countercultures of the American mid-century. Persistently foregrounding female experiences in the cold war 1950s and in the counterculture 1960s and in every decade up to the millennium, women writing Beat have brought nonconformity, skepticism, and gender dissent to postmodern culture and literary production in the United States and beyond.

Review Quotes

Girls Who Wore Black recovers neglected women writers who deserve more attention for their writing and for their historical role in the mid-century arts scene. This collection of essays reopens and revises the Beat canon, Beat history, and Beat poetics; it is an important contribution to literary criticism and history.--Jennie Skerl "author of A Tawdry Place of Salvation: The Art of Jane Bowles"

About the Author

Ronna C. Johnson is a lecturer in the departments of English and American Studies at Tufts University.

Nancy M. Grace is an associate professor in the department of English and director of the Program in Writing at The College of Wooster in Ohio. She is the author of The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature.