About this item
Beginning in the late 1940's, American literature discovered a four-letter word, and the word was "beat." Beat as in poverty and beatitude, ecstasy and exile. Beat was Jack Kerouac touring the American road in prose as fast and reckless as a V-8 Chevy. It was the junk-sick surrealism of William Burroughs; the wild, Whitmanesque poetry of Allen Ginsberg; and the lumberjack Zen of Gary Snyder. The Portable Beat Reader collects the most significant writing of these and fellow members (and spiritual descendants) of the Beat Generation, including Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Bob Dylan, Leroi Jones, and Michael McClure. In poetry, fiction, essays, song lyrics, letters, and memoirs, it captures the triumphant rudeness, energy, and exhilaration of a movement that swept through American letters with hurricane force.
About the Author
Ann 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 she attended the repeat performance of the Six Gallery Poetry reading in San Francisco where Allen Ginsberg gave his second public reading of Howl. It was here that she first met Jack Kerouac. She began collecting books written by beat writers when she was a graduate student at Columbia University, and after completing her doctorate she worked with Jack Kerouac to compile his bibliography. After his death she wrote the first Kerouac biography "Kerouac" - 1973, unique as she was the only biographer he co-operated with. She also edited his posthumous collection "Scattered Poems". She has written a literary study of Charles Olson and biographies of…
