Minor Characters records the cost the Beat Generation exacted of its most gifted women. Joan Burroughs and Elise Cowen didn’t survive, in part because they internalized their male Beat models too intimately; Hettie Jones postponed her own public career as a poet to further that of LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), then her husband. Yet, as Barbara Ehrenreich has argued, the male Beats provided an example of liberation for the feminists of the next decade,
