Charles Upton was born in San Francisco on 13 December 1948. He was raised in a suburb of San Rafael in Marin County, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. His education was exclusively Roman Catholic, as he attended a nursery school at a local Dominican Convent, St. Rafael Elementary School, and Marin Catholic High School. This seems to be the extent of his formal schooling for, as he states in the poem "Autobiography" from Time Raid (1969), "I went to college for two days."

Upton was barely ten years old when the media blitz hit with the news that there was an underground literary scene in America populated by "beatniks." However, despite his relatively young age and his late appearance on the Beat scene, Upton's qualifications for inclusion in this category of literature rest with the concerns, emphasis, and style of his poetry. The Beats, as John Clellon Holmes points...