Allen Ginsberg

Irwin Allen Ginsberg, born June 3, 1926, in Newark, New Jersey, was an American poet and writer who grew up in nearby Paterson and became one of the central figures of the Beat Generation. At Columbia University in the 1940s, he met Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and other writers who wanted a new literary approach, one that rejected the cultural conformity of post-World War II America. Ginsberg’s life and writing stood against militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he became closely associated with a counterculture open to drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and Eastern religions.

Ginsberg is best known for “Howl,” the 1956 poem in which he denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. The poem’s language and descriptions of heterosexual and homosexual sex led San Francisco police and U.S. Customs to seize copies, and a 1957 obscenity trial drew wide public attention. At the time, sodomy laws criminalized male homosexual acts in every state. Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that “Howl” was not obscene, defending the freedom of press and speech against what he called “vapid innocuous euphemisms.” The poem also reflected Ginsberg’s own sexuality and his relationships with men, including Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong partner.

The roots of Ginsberg’s thinking reached deep into his family life. His father, Louis Ginsberg, was a schoolteacher and published poet who encouraged literary study at home and favored traditional lyric poets such as Emily Dickinson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His mother, Naomi Levy Ginsberg, was born in Nevel, Russia, and was a fervent Marxist and member of the Communist Party USA. She took Allen and his brother Eugene to party meetings, and her stories of struggling workers and social injustice introduced him early to class struggle and social inequality. Naomi was also diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and spent long periods in institutions, experiences that shaped both “Howl” and Ginsberg’s long autobiographical poem “Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894–1956).”

As a student, Ginsberg wrote letters to The New York Times about World War II and workers’ rights, published early poems in the Paterson Morning Call, and became interested in Walt Whitman after a teacher’s passionate reading. He entered Columbia on a scholarship from the Young Men’s Hebrew Association of Paterson, first intending to study law before changing to literature. He contributed to the Columbia Review and the Jester, won the Woodberry Poetry Prize, and graduated in 1948 with a B.A. in English and American literature.

Ginsberg’s later life joined poetry, religion, teaching, and protest. A Buddhist who studied Eastern religions, he lived modestly, buying secondhand clothing and residing in apartments in New York City’s East Village. One of his most influential teachers was Tibetan Buddhist Chögyam Trungpa, founder of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. At Trungpa’s urging, Ginsberg and poet Anne Waldman started The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics there in 1974. Across decades, Ginsberg protested issues from the Vietnam War to the war on drugs, and his poem “September on Jessore Road” drew attention to refugees fleeing the Bangladesh genocide.

Recognition came alongside controversy and activism. The Fall of America shared the annual National Book Award for Poetry in 1974. In 1979, Ginsberg received the National Arts Club gold medal and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1995, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986–1992. He died on April 5, 1997, leaving work that still speaks with bluntness about power, desire, suffering, and the people pushed aside by official culture.