An appearnace and reading by the author recorded September 25, 2012 at 192 Books in New York City and made available here by the partnership between 192 Books and ARTonAIR.org.

In The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac (Viking), Joyce Johnson offers a groundbreaking portrait of Jack Kerouac as a young artist, focusing on Kerouac’s slow, often painful development as a writer over the first thirty years of his life, from his early struggles to master English through the grueling years of searching for a way to write On the Road, and ending with the astonishing breakthroughs in late 1951 that resulted in the opening sections of Visions of Cody.

Johnson’s experience as a writer of both fiction and memoir and her own vivid personal memories of Kerouac, with whom she had a romance when she was twenty-one years old in 1957, greatly inform her take on Kerouac’s creative process in The Voice is AllL, resulting in a book that greatly deepens our understanding of his life and his achievement.

Joyce Johnson’s eight books include the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award winner Minor Characters, the recent memoir Missing Men, the novel In the Night Café, and Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957–1958 (with Jack Kerouac). She has written for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and lives in New York City.