Janine Pommy Vega, part Polish, part Prussian, was born to Joseph P. and Irene Telkowski Pommy in Jersey City, New Jersey, on 5 February 1942. She had an uneventful childhood, normal in all respects. Perhaps her real birth begins, as her recollections do, in 1958 with her reading of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. This opened the first of many doors in her life. Bored with high school and full of her sixteen years of age, she came to New York City for weekends, to the Cedar Bar, where she met Gregory Corso. It was this meeting that led to Janine Pommy's long association with the group of writers subsequently called the Beats. Corso invited her and a friend down to meet Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Peter Orlovsky. Full of wonder, she was impressed by the fact that Corso "was calling them by their first names."

By June 1959, Pommy had...