1. Joan Vollmer was an influential participant in the early Beat Generation circle.
19 Facts About Joan Vollmer
1. 2.
Joan Vollmer claimed, and shortly thereafter denied, the killing was a drunken attempt at playing William Tell.
3.
Joan Vollmer was born in Ossining, New York, and raised in Loudonville, New York.
4.
Joan Vollmer graduated from St Agnes School in 1939 and attended Barnard College in New York City on a scholarship, studying journalism at Columbia University.
5.
Joan Vollmer met Edie Parker at the West End Bar and the two moved in together in the first of a series of apartments in New York's Upper West Side that they shared with the writers, hustlers, alcoholics and drug addicts that later became known as the Beats.
6.
Joan Vollmer's apartment in New York was a nucleus that attracted many of the characters who played a vital role in the formation of the Beat;.
7.
Joan Vollmer married Paul Adams, a law student, in 1944, and had her first child, Julie, in August 1944.
8.
In 1945, Joan Vollmer asked Adams, who was in the military at the time, to consent to divorce.
9.
Paul Adams divorced Joan Vollmer upon returning from military service, reportedly appalled by her drug use and group of friends.
10.
In 1946, Joan Vollmer was admitted to Bellevue Hospital in New York City due to psychotic episodes as a result of excessive amphetamine use.
11.
Joan Vollmer was then allowed to flee to Mexico City.
12.
Once he was settled, Joan Vollmer joined him, along with her children.
13.
Joan Vollmer's face was swollen; she limped due to a recent bout of polio.
14.
Herbert Huncke, who had stayed with the couple in Texas, was struck by Burroughs's indifference to Joan Vollmer, stating that Burroughs "didn't like to be annoyed with her too much".
15.
Joan Vollmer's parents heard news of their daughter's death from friends while on holiday in Montreal.
16.
Joan Vollmer was buried in Mexico City, and her parents took her two children back to the United States.
17.
Ginsberg and Carr defended Burroughs and believed that Joan Vollmer might have encouraged the William Tell incident, stating she had seemed suicidal when they visited her in 1951.
18.
Joan Vollmer is portrayed by Courtney Love and Burroughs by Kiefer Sutherland.
19.
Joan Vollmer's death is portrayed in the 1991 film Naked Lunch.