The Portable Sixties Reader

From Booklist
The fabled, too often trivialized sixties are open to endless interpretation, including a definition of the decade that slides into the seventies. In putting together this fresh and enlivening literary collection, Charters, a highly respected expert on Kerouac and the counterculture who came of age during that up-for-grabs, paradigm-altering time, sticks to a literal designation, thus uncovering the subtle, all-important roots of the more flamboyant flowerings of the era's distinctive, still alluring, and relevant sensibility. Charters has also wisely chosen to organize the selected essays, poetry, and fiction under thematic subjects, such as civil rights; women's rights; the sexual revolution; environmental issues; the antiwar, free-speech, and black-arts movements; and the use of drugs in pursuit of enlightenment. In combining the cultural with the political, Charters' first criterion is artistic, leading her to choose clarion works by the most significant of the decade's creative voices, including James Baldwin, Thomas Merton, Susan Sontag, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsburg, Rachel Carson, Kate Millett, Nikki Giovanni, and many more, thus creating a vibrant collage of the best of a revolutionary time. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

San Francisco Chronicle
A compulsively readable collection.

Seattle Times
Absorbing...a collection to be read...seething with emotion and urgency...

Book Description
From civil rights to free love, JFK to LSD, Woodstock to the Moonwalk, the Sixties was a time of change, political unrest, and radical experiments in the arts, sexuality, and personal identity. In this anthology of more than one hundred selections of essays, poetry, and fiction by some of America's most gifted writers, Ann Charters sketches the unfolding of this most turbulent decade.

The Portable Sixties Reader is organized into thematic chapters, from the Civil Rights movement to the Anti-Vietnam movement, the Free Speech movement, the Counterculture movement, drugs and the movement into Inner Space, the Beats and other fringe literary movements, the Black Arts movement, the Women's movement, and the Environmental movement. The concluding chapter, "Elegies for the Sixties," offers tributes to ten figures whose lives-and deaths-captured the spirit of the decade.

Edited with an introduction by Ann Charters

About the Author
Ann Charters has had a forty-year involvement in reading, collecting, and writing about the literature of the Counterculture. She edited The Portable Beat Reader, The Portable Jack Kerouac, two volumes of Kerouac's Selected Letters and Beat Down to Your Soul.


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Kerouac biographer and veteran anthologist Charters (The Portable Beat Reader, not reviewed, etc.) successfully conveys the atmosphere of the 1960s for those who lived through it, and those who did not. The four-page preface clearly explains her choices. Charters, who came of age during the 1960s, concedes that some of the pieces are very personal, meant to reflect her intense emotional and intellectual experiences. The selections and omissions are determined to some extent by the ten topical sections: civil rights, war resistance, free speech, the counterculture (largely in music as rendered here), mind-altering drugs, Beat literature, African-American arts, the women's movement (especially the sexual revolution), environmental protection, and "elegies" (portraits of ten people who died during the decade). Charters (English/Univ. of Connecticut) gives short shrift to innovative pieces of narrative journalism--Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Truman Capote are all excluded--but otherwise her choices seem unarguable. The introductions to each selection provide pertinent context, which is especially important because many of the selections are excerpts from books. A 25-page chronology of the decade will prove useful for those born after 1960, as well as offering forgotten tidbits for middle-aged and elderly readers.


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