Charters, Ann, foreword by Allen Ginsberg, — Jack Kerouac: a biography.

San Francisco, Straight Arrow Books, (1973). 1st prntg. VG Hardback, DJ poor. In Ginsberg foreword Author Charters loved Kerouac's art, did his first bibliography with him while alive, cherished his. scripture and literary soul-might, researched with difnity the interior of his novels and family, spoke many years with his friends and applied her vast tactful scholarship as a master musician archivist of jazz to the underwstanding of the musical sound as American lonely Prose Trumpeter of drunken Buddha Sacret Heart. Author Charters first met Kerouac in the spring of 1956 at a poetry reading in Berkeley. Peter Orlovsky took me there to hear his friend AllenGinsberg recite "Howl!" I remember Jack as a drkly intense, handsome young man in rumpled clothes who got to the theater early and stood up near the stage, holding high his own bottle of wine, fondly advising Kenneth Rexroth how to run the show. When crowds of people he gathered, he passed a hat for contributions and rushed out to buy gallons of wine so everybody iin the audience could drink too. I was impressed by his strong will and his wild energy. This book finally demystified Kerouac as a deeply flawed human being who nevertheless produced an imporatant and enormosly influential body of work which places him unequivocably amongtheranks of great American writers. Threee years later when I was a gradduate student at Columbia. This was a time when Time Magazine was needling the beatniks Kerouac was referred to as a Columbia alumnus and then went on to down him as a writer, but at the time I had liked Kerouac's picture of Berkeley life in the Dharma Bums. Owner inscription fep.