Joan Kennedy Taylor

Joan Kennedy Taylor
Taylor speaking at a conference in 1981
Born	(1926-12-21)December 21, 1926 New York, New York
Died	October 29, 2005(2005-10-29) (aged 78) New York, New York
Occupation	Journalist Editor
Nationality	United States
Relatives	Deems Taylor (father)

Joan Kennedy Taylor (December 21, 1926 – October 29, 2005) was an American journalist, author, editor, public intellectual, and political activist. She is best known for her advocacy of individualist feminism and for her role in the development of the modern American libertarian movement.

Taylor was born in Manhattan to prominent parents. Her father was composer, radio personality, and musical journalist Deems Taylor. Her mother was actress, playwright, and poet Mary Kennedy. She grew up in New York, in suburban Connecticut, and, after her parents separated when she was six years old, around the world. Her father's biographer, James Pegolotti, writes that "[b]y 1942, owing to a peregrinating mother, Joan had attended eight schools, in such far-flung spots as Peking, Paris, and Ellsworth, Maine, as well as New York."

After graduating from St. Timothy's School, Taylor returned to New York to study playwrighting at Barnard College. There she met Donald A. Cook, a psychology undergraduate at nearby Columbia University. After their marriage in 1948, Taylor went to work as an actress on stage, radio, and television (with the usual assortment of accompanying dead-end day jobs). Much of her spare time she devoted to auditing graduate courses in psychology at Columbia, where Cook was now pursuing a Ph.D., and to dabbling in the ideas of G. I. Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky.

In the early 1950s, the Cooks hosted a series of legendary parties at their ground floor apartment on 112th Street, near the Barnard and Columbia campuses. Joyce Johnson, in her memoir Minor Characters, recalls the place as "like an apartment at the bottom of a well – midnight even on a sunny day. The door was never locked. You never knew whom you’d find there. Psychologists, Dixieland jazz musicians, poets, runaway girls, a madman named Carl Solomon whom an old Columbia classmate of [Donald’s], Allen Ginsberg, had met in a psychiatric ward." Nor were Solomon and Allen Ginsberg the only Beat Generation luminaries to attend these gatherings. There were also William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr, Gregory Corso, and Jack Kerouac.