She began collecting books written by Beat writers when she was a graduate student at Columbia University (M.A.
Charters was denied access to Kerouac's archives and so she relied heavily upon his own fictionalized accounts of his life.
[5] She also edited his posthumous collection Scattered Poems and both volumes of his Selected Letters as a life-in-letters biography.. She has written a literary study of Charles Olson and biographies of black entertainer Bert Williams and (with her husband Samuel Charters, a musicologist) the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.
She was the general editor of the two volume encyclopedia The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America.
Charters published a collection of her photographic portraits of well-known writers in the book Beats & Company.