Johnson met Kerouac much later, in early 1957, when she was twenty-one and he thirty-four, nine months before the publication of his best-selling novel On the Road (1957). A respected author in her own right, Johnson was a second-generation woman writer in an all-male movement; until recently, if she was considered a Beat at all, it was only by association, as Kerouac’s former girlfriend and present-day chronicler.
