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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. Her husband Sam, the well-known blues and jazz historian, record producer, and critic, was in residence but not part of the interview. 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.
Sixteen years later, we had the opportunity to talk with her again about her extensive body of work and to invite her assessment of that work, the fields it has brought into being, and the foundation it has provided for future work. We wanted to elicit and document the reflections of Charters whose work and career of over 50 years generated and sanctioned a new field of academic study and who presided over what became an often contentious, free-wheeling, and varied gang of writers, critics, fans, and acolytes of Beat artists, Beat literature and arts, and the Beat generation itself, to which she was also an early witness and accomplice. It was invaluable to have the chance to talk about what we do with the progenitor of our profession outside the usual bustle of doing it, and we appreciate Charters's thoughtfulness and candor, maybe especially when her answers surprised us.
Charters was prompted by a wide-ranging set of questions, to which she responded, distinctively, on her own terms. We asked
1) How do you assess your inaugural work on Kerouac?
2) What do you think of the field of Kerouac studies now?
3) When you consider your long and extremely impressive career, what moments, relationships, texts stand out, and why
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