Literature and Its Writers: A Compact Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama
Ann Charters received her B.A. at Berkeley and her Ph.D. at Columbia. She first met Kerouac at a poetry reading in Berkeley in 1956, and compiled a comprehensive bibliography of his work in 1967. A professor of English at the University of Connecticut, she is also the editor ofSelected Letters of Jack Kerouacand thePortable Kerouac Reader,and the author ofBeats and Company: Portrait of a Literary Generation. Samuel Charters has taught creative writing and published widely in a variety of genres, including eleven books of poetry, four novels, a book of criticism on contemporary American poetry, a biography (coauthored with Ann Charters) of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and translations of the poetry of Tomas Transtromer and Edith Sodergran. An ethnomusicologist, he produces blues and jazz recordings and has published many books about music, among them a history of New Orleans jazz and a study of bluesman Robert Johnson.