Ann Charters

Ann Charters, professor of English at the University of Connecticut, 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 Berkeley where Allen Ginsberg gave his second public reading of Howl.

She began collecting books by Beat writers while 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 and 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) the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. She was the general editor of the two-volume encyclopaedia The Beats: Literary Bohemians In Postwar America and has published a collection of her photographic portraits of well-known writers in the book Beats & Company. She has also edited Jack Kerouac's On the Road for Penguin Twentieth Century Classics and The Portable Beat Reader (Penguin Classics).