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Allen Ginsberg

Poet

Allen Ginsberg's groundbreaking poem Howl began with the words, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix..." As a student at Columbia University in New York in the 1950s, Ginsberg fell in with rebel writers such as Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. He travelled to San Francisco, where his 1955 public reading of Howl launched the poem as a counterculture hit, helped along by the publicity over an obscenity charge against Ginsberg, a homosexual. During the 1960s Ginsberg became one of the more prominent figures in the American anti-war movement, as he also joined love-ins, took LSD, and generally grabbed every opportunity to harass the authorities. Still, his anger and rebellion were perceived as generally good-natured, and in 1974 he won the National Book Award for The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965-1971. in his later years he served as a kind of Grand Old Man of pop counterculture, even appearing in a video for MTV in 1996.

Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac all appear in our loop on Counterculture Heavyweights.

Blog posts mentioning Allen Ginsberg:
Fidel vs. Flintstone

Four Good Links

Literary Kicks

Great site about the beat poets and all that jazz

Allen Ginsberg Trust

Official site, with a timeline and beat links

Allen Ginsberg: Covert Patriot

Biographical and critical essay about his life and works

Film & Video: Allen Ginsberg

Short film followed by a link to several audio files

Vital Stats

Birth

3 June 1926

Birthplace

Newark, New Jersey

Death

5 April 1997
(cancer-related heart attack, age 70)

Best Known As

Beat-era poet who wrote Howl