Journal Article

The Beat Interview Ann Charters

Johnson, Ronna C, Grace, Nancy M

2017

Overview

Interview with Ann Charters Introduction On March 13, 2000, we, the editors of the Journal of Beat Studies - before there was even the inkling of an idea of a JBS - interviewed Ann Charters at her home in Storrs, Connecticut. Published in Q & A form in our Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Beat Women Writers (2004), the interview featured Charters talking about her perception of her role in studies of the Beat generation; her early days getting to know Beat writers such as Kerouac, Ginsberg, Orlovsky, and Huncke; her experiences as a female graduate student in English at Columbia University, and as a literary critic in a male-dominant profession; her work as a photographer; her favorite women Beat writers; the condition and status of race relations in the Beat movement; and her work as a literary editor. When the professor scheduled to teach a Chaucer class in the Major Writers series became ill, the scheduling committee accepted my proposal to substitute these two Beat writers as major authors. Placing my archive of Beat literature, collected since 1962, in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library in 1992, and then immediately beginning all over again to collect Beat materials in order to start another Beat archive at the Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut in Storrs as an ongoing project. 20. [...]the tumult and uncertainty-after four years of work and the tension of getting each page past the Kerouac estate and then...

• Publisher: Pace University
• Subject: Authorship / Beat Generation / Biographies / Charters, Ann / College students / di Prima, Diane / Editors / Females / Ginsberg, Allen (1926-1997) / Holmes, John Clellon (1926-1988) / Kerouac, Jack (1922-1969) / Literary canon / Literary criticism / Literary devices / Literature / Middle English / Poetry / Publishing / Publishing industry / Short stories / Writers