Journals: Early Fifties, Early Sixties

Allen Ginsberg

Dec 2007 · Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

About this ebook

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Allen Ginsberg and his fellow Beats led an insurrection that profoundly altered the American literary and cultural landscapes. Collected here are journal entries culed from eighteen notebooks that Ginsberg kept during this extraordinary period -- thoughts, poems, dreams, reflections, and diary notes that intimately illuminate Ginsberg's actual travels and his mental journeys. They reveal a remarkable and fascinating life: conversations with William Carlos Williams; drug experiences; a chance meeting with Dylan Thomas; stays in Mexico, San Francisco, and New York; first impressions of "Naked Lunch"; bits and peices of "America, Kaddish" and other poems; political "ravings"; and, of course, times with William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Gergory Corso, Herbert Huncke, Peter Orlovsky, and many, many others. What emerges is a truly unique personal account that will touch the mind and the soul.

About the author

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, the son of poet and teacher Louis Ginsberg. In 1948, he received a B.A. degree from Columbia University. Ginsberg began writing poetry while still in school and first gained wide public recognition in 1956 with the long poem Howl. Howl has had a stormy history. When it was first recited at poetry readings, audiences cheered wildly. It was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books and printed in England. Before the printed copies could be distributed, however they were seized by U.S. custom officials as obscene. After a famous court case in which the poem was found not to be obscene, the work sold rapidly and Ginsberg's reputation was assured. Regarded as the foremost port of the Beat generation (as group of rebellious writers who opposed conformity and sough intensity of experience), Ginsberg's work is concerned with many subjects of contemporary interest, including drugs, sexual confusion, the voluntary poverty of the artist and rebel, and rejection of society. He is a poet with a significant message, and his criticism of American society is part of a long tradition of American writers who have questioned their country's values. Ginsberg received numerous honors, including a Woodbury Poetry Prize, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and a National Book Award for poetry. Ginsberg was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1995 for his book Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986-1992. Ever the Bohemian, he had numerous occupations throughout his lifetime including dishwasher, porter, book reviewer, and spot welder. He died in April 1997 of complications due to liver cancer.