A report on Six Gallery reading, Ann Charters and Beat Generation

Conceived by Wally Hedrick, this event was the first important public manifestation of the Beat Generation and helped to herald the West Coast literary revolution that continued the San Francisco Renaissance.

She is a Jack Kerouac and Beat Generation scholar.

She is a professor of American Literature at the University of Connecticut at Storrs and has been interested in Beat writers since 1956, when as an undergraduate English major at the University of California, Berkeley (B.A. 1957) she attended the repeat performance of the Six Gallery Poetry reading in San Francisco where Allen Ginsberg gave his second public reading of "Howl."

Also there was Ann Charters, then a UC Berkeley college student.

When asked by Wally Hedrick to organize the Six Gallery reading, Ginsberg wanted Rexroth to serve as master of ceremonies, in a sense to bridge generations.

Charters, Ann (ed.) (1992) The Portable Beat Reader. Penguin Books. ISBN: 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN: 0-14-015102-8 (pbk). The table of contents is online.