Come and Join the Dance: A Novel

By: Joyce Johnson

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Synopsis: The daring debut of the Beat Generation&’s first woman novelistIt&’s 1955. Seven days before her graduation from Barnard College, Susan Levitt asks herself, &“What if you lived your entire life without urgency?&” just before going out to make things happen to her that will shatter the mask of conformity concealing her feelings of alienation. If Susan continues to be &“good,&” marriage and security await her. But her hunger is rising for the self-discovery that comes from existential freedom. After breaking up with the Columbia boy she knows she could marry, Susan seeks out those she considers &“outlaws&”: the brave and fragile Kay, who has moved into a rundown hotel, in order to &“see more than fifty percent when I walk down the street&”; the vulnerable adolescent rebel Anthony; and Peter, the restless hipster graduate student who has become the object of Kay&’s unrequited devotion.This fascinating novel—which the author began writing a year before her encounter with Jack Kerouac—is a young woman&’s complex response to the liberating messages of the Beat Generation. In a subversive feminist move, Johnson gives her heroine all the freedom the male Beat writers reserved for men, to travel her own road.

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