Ginsberg, Allen (1926–1997)

Poet, musician, photographer, and activist, Allen Ginsberg helped define a revolution in American aesthetics and culture. An outspoken advocate for free speech, civil rights, anti-war activism, gender equality, Buddhism, environmental justice, and nonviolent activism, Ginsberg has come to represent the idealism, new vision, and occasional excess of postwar America.

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, to Louis and Naomi Ginsberg, into a Jewish middle-class family in Newark, New Jersey. Father Louis was a respected poet and high school teacher, and both parents were active members of the communist and socialist parties. Allen grew up in a liberal household beset by personal trauma. His mother, Naomi, suffered from mental illness. She was committed to an asylum in 1935 and eventually lobotomized in 1947. Her struggles would deeply influence Ginsberg's work throughout his life.

In September 1943, Ginsberg began attending New York's Columbia University, intending to become a labor lawyer. He was soon sidetracked by the many writers, artists, and petty criminals who quickly became [Page 620]his friends and would end up forming the nucleus of what would later be called the Beat Generation, a literary movement inspired by literary iconoclasts such as Arthur Rimbaud, Walt Whitman, and Ferdinand Celine, among others, as well as spontaneity and poetics of the fledgling bebop scene. Within a few years, Ginsberg would meet Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr, Neal Cassady, and Herbert Huncke, among many others who would eventually lead a literary rebellion against the academic literature and conservative culture of 1950s America.

After living for some time with the writer and petty thief, Herbert Huncke, in an apartment in Spanish Harlem, Allen was arrested along with several of his friends in 1949. As a condition of his release, he was institutionalized at the Columbia Psychiatric Institute, where he met Carl Solomon, who would become a friend and inspiration for his best-known poem. Once released, he spent the next several years traveling and writing poetry, as the Beat Generation moniker began to take hold in the American media. In 1955, Ginsberg finished and debuted his long poem, Howl for Carl Solomon, at a reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco.

Ferlinghetti's City Lights Publishers printed the first edition of Howl and Other Poems in the fall of 1956. Shortly after, in March of 1957, a portion of the second printing was seized and held by U.S. customs as obscene material. It was released after the ACLU threatened to challenge the legality of the seizure. In May, undercover police officers arrested the manager of City Lights Bookstore, Shigeyoshi Murao, along with Ferlinghetti, for selling copies of Howl. The incident would spark the Howl obscenity trial and an outcry against government censorship. Judge Clayton Horn's findings in favor of Ferlinghetti and Murao established the legal precedent that authorities must rule out any possible “redeeming social importance” in banning materials from American audiences. This allowed for the printing of well-known authors whose work had hitherto been banned in the United States, including works by authors D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller. It would also launch Ginsberg into the public eye and gain him a vast readership. In 1961, City Lights published his haunting epic poem Kaddish, a tribute to and exploration of his relationship with his afflicted mother Naomi. It would solidify his reputation as one of America's most promising poets.

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