Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation

Marc Notes: Bibl. ref. & index; Avail. in cloth @ $60.00. Publisher Marketing: "Girls Who Wore Black recovers neglected women writers who deserve more attention for their writing and for their historical role in the mid-century arts scene. This collection of essays reopens and revises the Beat canon, Beat history, and Beat poetics; it is an important contribution to literary criticism and history."-Jennie Skerl, author of A Tawdry Place of Salvation: The Art of Jane Bowles "Ronna Johnson and Nancy Grace have done an invaluable service for students of American literature: their collection begins with an essential essay about the three generations of Beat women and then provides fine contributions by critics Anthony Libby, Linda Russo, Maria Damon, Tim Hunt, and others. The value of this book is so clear one must wonder why it wasn't available much earlier."-Linda Wagner-Martin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill What do we know about the women who played an important role in creating the literature of the Beat Generation? Until recently, very little. Studies of the movement have effaced or excluded women writers, such as Elise Cowen, Joyce Johnson, Joanne Kyger, Hettie Jones, and Diane Di Prima, each one a significant figure of the postwar Beat communities. Equally free-thinking and innovative as the founding generation of men, women writers, fluent in Beat, hippie, and women's movement idioms, partook of and bridged two important countercultures of the American mid-century. Persistently foregrounding female experiences in the cold war 1950s and in the counterculture 1960s and in every decade up to the millennium, women writing Beat have brought nonconformity, skepticism, and gender dissent to postmodern culture and literary production in the United States and beyond. Ronna C. Johnson is a lecturer in the departments of English and American Studies at Tufts University. Nancy M. Grace is an associate professor in the department of English and director of the Program in Writing at The College of Wooster in Ohio. She is the author of The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature. Review Citations:

Library Journal 05/01/2002 pg. 101 (EAN 9780813530659, Paperback)

Library Journal 05/01/2002 pg. 101 (EAN 9780813530642, Hardcover)

Contributor Bio:  Charters, Ann Ann Charters, Storrs, Connecticut, is professor emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut, where she taught for more than thirty years. She is the author and editor of numerous books on writers of the Beat Generation, including "Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation?", "The Portable Beat Reader", and "Kerouac: A Biography". Contributor Bio:  Charters, Ann Ann Charters received her B. A. at Berkeley and her Ph. D. at Columbia. She first met Kerouac at a poetry reading in Berkeley in 1956, and compiled a comprehensive bibliography of his work in 1967. A professor of English at the University of Connecticut, she is also the editor of "Selected Letters of Jack Kerouac" and the "Portable Kerouac Reader,"" "and the author of "Beats and Company: Portrait of a Literary Generation,"Contributor Bio:  Grace, Nancy McCampbell Nancy M. Grace is a professor of English at The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. She is the co-author of "Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Beat Women Writers, "the co-editor of "Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation, "and author of "The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Fiction," She has published articles and given papers on Jack Kerouac, James Joyce, interdisciplinary studies, gender studies, and rhetoric and composition. She is also one of the founding members of the Beat Studies Association.