What were the essential steps in my creation of The Portable Sixties Reader? To begin with, I had come of age during the Sixties. I had read the new books and danced to the new music; traveled with my husband Samuel Charters in a series of temperamental old cars to record and film blues artists in the South; attended poetry readings and "happenings" in crowded churches, art galleries, theaters, and lofts; interviewed and photographed writers on the East and West coasts; marched in many of the demonstrations; marveled at the poster art; experimented with a lot of substances. I wanted to tell the story of the turbulent times I had lived through myself.

The first step was my passionate desire to compile a book about that period. I knew that many anthologies of Sixties writing in the United States were already available, but those I'd seen were collections of primary documents covering political, social, and cultural aspects of the 1960s. When I browsed in them, I always had the feeling that something essential was missing—the literary element, which was what I was interested in most of all.

My work for Penguin had been with Beat literature, and I was eager to extend my previous anthologies such as The Portable Beat Reader (1992), The Portable Jack Kerouac Reader (1995), and Beat Down to Your Soul (2001) into the broader field of American literature of dissent at mid-twentieth century. I was curious about how the writing of the Beat authors would fare when juxtaposed with the writing of their contemporaries. The best way to find out was to compile a book of my favorite literary essays, poems, and fiction by all the Sixties authors, both famous and obscure, whom I admired. When my editor at Penguin, Michael Millman, asked me to create such a book two years ago, and to organize it topically by focusing on the most important social movements of the decade, I jumped at the chance.

The next important step was talking to my friends, teaching colleagues, and students at the University of Connecticut about whom I should include in the anthology. Everyone I knew had opinions about what happened in the United States in the Sixties and wanted to engage me in fierce discussion about their favorite writers and books.

This list was to wax and wane drastically throughout the years it took to complete the anthology, as well-wishers gave me the names of books on the Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Movement and the Environmental Movement and all the other Movements I was interested in. Sometimes I lucked out on my own in bookstores, such as the muggy late summer evening in Brooklyn when I compulsively browsed until closing time through all the shelves of in-print fiction in the air-conditioned Bookcourt Bookshop in Cobble Hill. There I discovered Charles Johnson's fine novel about Martin Luther King, Dreamer (1998). Other books literally fell into my hands when I wasn't looking. Visiting New Orleans, I spotted Thomas Merton's Original Child Bomb (1962) in its original small press edition on the crowded shelves of a rare book dealer's office downtown, where I had gone one cool day in early spring to pick up a large parcel as a favor for a distant Swedish friend. Another afternoon, browsing in the open stacks of books on the fourth floor of the Babbidge Library at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, I pulled out a slender, faded anthology of Asian-American writing dwarfed by the taller volumes around it. In my hands the little paperback opened to Janice Mirikitani's anti-Vietnam war poem "Attack the Water."

The next step was my dogged perseverance in the face of the predictably unpleasant process of delay, obfuscation, and negotiation involved in obtaining the permissions necessary to reprint the selections I wanted to include in the anthology (all the while keeping the permission costs as close to my budget as possible). Finding the current addresses of authors and publishers was only the first stage of the problem. I learned that if it took several months of cajoling hesitant authors, trying to persuade them to include their work in the reader, they usually wouldn't sign and return the permissions agreement I'd sent them. Or, if editors or agents took an unconscionable length of time to reply to my letters, their authors would often insist on selecting the material they wanted to see in the anthology themselves—and their choice would probably not fit with my underlying concept of the book.

Which brings me to the last and most important step it took to compile a reader of Sixties literature—a step implicit in all the others: having a clear idea of what I wanted to do on every page of the anthology. I had very strong feelings about what I had done and seen and felt in the Sixties. As I said in the Preface to The Portable Sixties Reader, I was trying to put together a book that would suggest the possibility that American culture as a vital and living force in the Sixties helped to bring about constructive social change through the moral courage and imagination of its writers.

Recently, imagining The Portable Sixties Reader coming off the press, I visualized each copy of the newly minted paperback marching down a ramp to form a line of committed soldiers, thousands of them, each identically trim and fit in its bright, colorful cover, ready and able to withstand the forces of apathy and ignorance active in the world inhabited by its readers. As I see it, this book and its stalwart companions The Portable Beat Reader, The Portable Jack Kerouac Reader, and Beat Down to Your Soul are bearers of illumination, each carrying the light of its time into the darkly uncertain territory ahead.