Copyright Allen Ginsberg/Fahey Klein Gallery

     Perhaps best known as the common law wife of Willliam S. Burroughs, the
     inspiration for Jane Lee in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and the muse
     behind Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Joan Vollmer “was the whetstone against
     which the main Beat writers…sharpened their intellect” (Knight 49).

Vollmer grew up in Loundonville, New York.  Like Burroughs, Vollmer ejected the privileged background from which she came.  Vollmer moved to New York City in 1939 and enrolled in Barnard College, where she "she studied journalism and sharpened her rejection of the status quo by reading Plato, Kant and Proust voraciously - usually with bubble bath up to her neck in the tub.  She had a restless intellect that many of the Beats described as far exceeding her years." (Crary).

She married Paul Adams, a law student who was drafted a few months before she gave birth to their daughter, Julie. During his absence, Joan began having affairs with other men. 
 

She befriended Edie Parker, and they eventually became roommates.  Their apartment became a hub for the burgeoning Beat community and was frequented by early Beat figures like Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs.  Vollmer and Burroughs connected almost immediately, developing a strong mental attraction that lead to all-night conversations and  psychic exchanges  between the two.  Their relationship soon became intimate despite Burroughs homosexuality, and they began living together in the summer of 1945.

Vollmer developed a severe addiction to benzedrine while in New York, which eventually caused Adams to divorce her.  She began frequently hallucinating and was committed to Bellevue after the police found her wandering the streets, dazed and incoherent, with young Julie.  Burroughs checked her out of the hospital and immediately proposed to her. 

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