In A Language of Song, Samuel Charters—one of the pioneering collectors of African American music—writes of a trip to West Africa where he found “a gathering of cultures and a conti
Samuel Charters has been studying and writing about New Orleans music for more than fifty years. A Trumpet around the Corner: The Story of New Orleans Jazz is the first book to tell the entire story o
Wine is becoming increasingly popular in the Anglophone world and there are many books available which describe how and where it is made. However, none address the fundamental questions of different
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 thi
Now that Kerouac's major novel, On the Road is accepted as an American classic, academic critics are slowly beginning to catch up with his experimental literary methods and examine the dozen books com
The 1998 Good Friday Agreement that ended the conflict in Northern Ireland left intriguing questions unanswered: who made the crucial decisions about the use of the British Army during the Troubles ?
Samuel Charters belongs to a small group of writers about music whose work has transformed their -subject—without his discoveries, insights and interventions, the history of blues over the past 50 yea
Beginning in the late 1940's, American literature discovered a four-letter word, and the word was "beat." Beat as in poverty and beatitude, ecstasy and exile. Beat was Jack Kerouac touring the America
In the summer of 1958, jazz and blues historian Samuel Charters traveled with Ann Danberg to Andros, a remote island "on the wrong side of the wind" in the Bahamas. Living within a small local communi
The first volume of Jack Kerouac's selected letters, published in 1995, was hailed as an important and revealing addition to Kerouac scholarship. This second and final volume, comprising letters writ
