Ann Charters

Ann Charters is Professor Emerita at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, where she has taught, edited, and written primarily on the Beat generation. She attended the repeat performance of the Six Gallery Poetry reading in San Francisco, where Allen Ginsberg offered his second public reading of “Howl,” and where she met Jack Kerouac; after her doctorate at Columbia University, she would write the first Kerouac bibliography (published 1973). She has edited a two-volume encyclopedia, titled The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America, published a collection of photographic portraits in Beat & Company, as well as edited The Portable Beat Reader, The Portable Sixties Reader, Beat Down to Your Soul, The Portable Jack Kerouac, and Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation, which she co-authored with her husband Samuel Charters, a musicologist.
 

Charters first began corresponding with Charles Olson in 1968, during her own studies on Melville, and continued until his death in 1970; this correspondence is published in Evidence of What Is Said (2015). She is the author of Olson/Melville: A Study of Affinity, first published by Oyez Press (1968), and editor of Olson’s Special View of History, also published by Oyez in 1970. She delivered the Eight Annual Charles Olson Memorial Lecture in Gloucester, Massachusetts in 2017.