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. Contributors include: Edward Abbey, Sherman Alexie, James Baldwin, Richard Brautigan, Lenny Bruce, Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, Jim Carroll, Rachel Carson, Carlos Castenada, Bob Dylan, Betty Friedan, Nikki Giovanni, Michael Herr, Abbie Hoffman, Robert Hunter, Ken Kesey, Martin Luther King, Jr., Timothy Leary, Denise Levertov, Norman Mailer, Malcolm X, Country Joe McDonald, Kate Millet, Tim O’Brien, Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, Gloria Steinem, Hunter S. Thompson, Calvin Trillin, Alice Walker, Eudora Welty and more. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. 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 A compulsively readable collection. -- San Francisco Chronicle Absorbing...a collection to be read...seething with emotion and urgency... -- Seattle Times Ann Charters , a Jack Kerouac and Beat Generation scholar, is professor of American Literature emerita at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. in 1966, she worked with Kerouac to compile his bibliography, and was the only biographer who interviewed him about the circumstances in which he wrote his books. She is the author of his first biography, Kerouac , in 1973. She edited his posthumous poetry collection, Scattered Poems . She is also the editor of numerous books on Beat and other literature, including The Portable Beat Reader , The Portable Sixties Reader , Beat Down to Your Soul , The Portable Jack Kerouac Reader , and two volumes of Kerouac’s Selected Letters .