Ann Charters Papers

Scholar, author, photographer, and life-long editor and chronicler of Jack Kerouac and other writers of the Beat Generation, Ann Charters was born in November 1936 in Bridgeport, CT, the daughter of Nathan (a contractor) and Kate (Schultz) Danberg. She attended the University of California, Berkeley (B.A., 1957) and Columbia University (M.A., 1959, Ph.D., 1965). Charters career has included teaching creative writing at Colby Junior College, New London, NH (1961-63), working as an assistant editor at Random House-Knopf (1965) and continuing as an educator at Columbia University (instructor in literature, 1965-66), New York City Community College of Applied Arts and Sciences of the City University of New York (assistant professor of English (1967-70) and University of Connecticut (associate professor, 1974-81, professor of English, 1981-2011). She has been awarded fellowships from Columbia University (1958-59, 1963-64, 1965-66) and grants from the University of Connecticut (1975-76, 1981, 1983, 1984, 1986). Charters is a member of International PEN and Phi Beta Kappa. Her writings include: Olson/Melville: A Study in Affinity, Oyez, 1968; Nobody: The Story of Bert Williams, Macmillan, 1970; Kerouac: A Biography, Straight Arrow Books, 1973, reprinted with a new introduction, St. Martin's, 1987; Beats and Company: Portrait of a Literary Generation, Doubleday, 1986; The American Short Story and Its Writer, St. Martin's, 2000; Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation?, for Viking Penguin, 2001. Included among the many works edited by Charters during her fifty-year career are: Charles Olson, Special View of History, Oyez, 1969; Scattered Poems by Jack Kerouac, City Lights Books, 1970; Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Scenes along the Road, Gotham Book Mart, 1970; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 16: The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America, Gale, 1983; The Story and Its Writer, second edition, St. Martin's, 1986, fifth edition, 1998; The Portable Beat Reader, Viking Penguin, 1992; The Penguin Book of the Beat, Penguin UK, 1993; Howls, Raps & Roars: Recordings of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance (audio recording), Fantasy Records, 1993; The Kerouac Reader, Viking Penguin, 1995; Selected Letters of Jack Kerouac, 1940-1956, Viking Penguin, 1995; (And author of introduction) Jack Kerouac, Big Sur, Prague, Czechoslovakia, 1995; Literature and Its Writers, St. Martin's, 1997; and Selected Letters of Jack Kerouac, 1957-1969, Viking Penguin, 2000 In 2001, Ann Charters told Contemporary Authors "My primary motivation for writing is to entertain and to inform. What influences my work are my students at the University of Connecticut--they are often smart and responsive, and I want more than anything to share my passion for literature with them. In the past two decades my work has continued in the two fields of Beat Generation writers and the American short story that I've been involved with ever since I began college teaching almost forty years ago."