The best minds of a generation drag themselves through the streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, and the poem that follows them there does not flinch, does not pause for propriety, and does not stop until it has catalogued every ecstasy and degradation the postwar American night has to offer. First read aloud at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955, the obscenity trial that followed its publication made it the most famous poem of its era. The long Whitmanesque lines accumulate like a prophetic litany, each beginning with "who," building a cathedral of outcasts and visionaries. It is a poem of rage and tenderness in equal measure, a lament for the mad and the holy that insists there is no difference between the two.