Allen Ginsberg

Born in 1926 in Newark, New Jersey, to a lyric poet father and a mother whose paranoid schizophrenia would land her in Pilgrim State Hospital, Ginsberg grew up navigating between literature and madness. At Columbia University he fell in with Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Lucien Carr, forming the nucleus of what would become the Beat Generation. After a brief stint in a psychiatric institute, where he met Carl Solomon, the dedicatee of his most famous poem, he moved to San Francisco and, on October 7, 1955, read "Howl" at the Six Gallery to an audience that included Kerouac passing jugs of wine. City Lights published Howl and Other Poems (1956), and the ensuing obscenity trial made Ginsberg a household name and free-speech landmark. Kaddish (1961), a raw elegy for his mother Naomi, proved he was more than a one-poem provocateur. He chanted mantras at the 1968 Democratic Convention, was tear-gassed in Grant Park, and helped coin the phrase "flower power." He studied under Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and cofounded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute in 1974. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1992. He died of liver cancer in his East Village loft on April 5, 1997, surrounded by friends, having spent his final days making phone calls to say goodbye.

One summer afternoon in 1948, alone in an East Harlem apartment, Ginsberg was reading Blake's 'Ah! Sun-flower' when he heard a deep, ancient voice reciting the poem aloud. He took it for Blake himself. Looking out the window, he felt certain the sky concealed a living creator. He spent the next fifteen years trying to recover that vision.