Ann Charters

Ann Charters (née Ann Ruth Danberg; born November 10, 1936) is a professor of American Literature at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. She is a Jack Kerouac and Beat Generation scholar.^[1][2]

Early life and career

Charters was born on November 10, 1936, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She is a professor of American Literature at the University of Connecticut at Storrs and has been interested in Beat writers since 1956, when as an undergraduate English major at the University of California, Berkeley (B.A. 1957) she attended the repeat performance of the Six Gallery Poetry reading in San Francisco where Allen Ginsberg gave his second public reading of "Howl." She began collecting books written by Beat writers when she was a graduate student at Columbia University (M.A. 1960; Ph.D 1965).

After completing her doctorate, she worked with Jack Kerouac to compile his bibliography.^[2] After his death she wrote the first Kerouac biography,^[2][3] Kerouac: A Biography (1973). Charters' book is unique as she was the only biographer who had access to Kerouac and interviewed him about the circumstances in which he wrote his books.^{[citation needed]} She also edited his posthumous collection Scattered Poems.

She has written a literary study of Charles Olson and biographies of black entertainer Bert Williams and (with her husband Samuel Charters, a musicologist) the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. She was the general editor of the two volume encyclopedia The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America.^[2] She is also the editor of numerous volumes on Beat and 1960s American literature, including The Portable Beat Reader, The Portable Sixties Reader, Beat Down To Your Soul, The Portable Jack Kerouac,^[2] and in 2010 Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation, which she co-authored with her husband.

Charters published a collection of her photographic portraits of well-known writers in the book Beats & Company. Her photographs of the Nobel-Prize winning Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer illustrate Samuel Charters' English translation of Tranströmer's long poem Baltics (2012). She also photographed Olson in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in her book of their letters, Evidence of What Is Said (2015).

Publications

• Charters, Ann (1967). A Bibliography of Works by Jack Kerouac: (Jean Louis Lebris De Kerouac) 1939–1967. New York: The Phoenix Bookshop.
• ___ (1968). Olson/Melville: A Study in Affinity. Berkeley: Oyez.
• ___, ed. (1970). Charles Olson, The Special View of History. Berkeley: Oyez.
• ___ (1973). Kerouac: A biography. San Francisco: Straight Arrow.^[4]
• ___ (1986). Beats and Company: Portrait of a Literary Generation. Garden City: Doubleday.
• ___ and Allen Ginsberg (1986). Scenes Along the Road: Photographs of the Desolation Angels.^[2]
• ___, ed. (1992). The Portable Beat Reader. Viking.^[2]
• ___, ed. (1996). The Portable Jack Kerouac Reader. New York: Viking.
• ___, ed. (1995). Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, Vol 1, 1940–1956. Viking.^[2][5]
• ___, ed. (1999). Jack Kerouac: selected letters, Vol 2, 1957–1969. New York: Viking^[1][6]
• ___, ed. (2001). Beat down to your soul: What was the Beat Generation?. New York: Penguin.
• ___, ed. (2003). The Portable Sixties Reader. New York: Viking.
• ___ and Samuel Charters (2010). Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

References

1. "Jottings from the hard shoulder". The Guardian. 26 March 2000. Retrieved 2022-01-03.
2. Douglas, Ann (9 April 1995). "On the Road Again". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2022-01-03.
3. O'Hagan, Sean (5 August 2007). "Sean O'Hagan on Jack Kerouac's dazzling novel On the Road". The Guardian. Retrieved 2022-01-03.
4. O'Conner, Patricia T. (10 May 1987). "New & Noteworthy". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2022-01-03.
5. "Kerouac joins the mainstream". The Guardian. 4 August 1996. Retrieved 2022-01-03.
6. "The Typist". The New York Times. Retrieved 2022-01-03.

External links

• Works by or about Ann Charters in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Finding aid to the Ann Charters papers at Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library