Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1929, and grew up in nearby Paterson. His father was a poet and schoolteacher. His mother’s mental illness and communist upbringing became recurring subjects in Ginsberg’s own poetry. Ginsberg befriended Beat writers William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac while studying at Columbia University, and poet Gary Snyder while living in San Francisco in the 1950s. His first poem, “Howl,” published in 1956, was controversial. Obscenity charges brought against his book Howl and Other Poems were dismissed in court, but the attention brought him recognition as a new voice in American poetry. A lifelong nonviolent, anti-war, anti-nuclear power, pro-gay rights, and anti-censorship activist, Ginsberg became a practicing Buddhist after meeting Trungpa Rinpoche, and helped him found the Naropa Institute and its Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets in Boulder, Colorado. He lived with his partner, fellow poet Peter Orlovsky, in New York’s East Village, where he died in 1997. He remains one of America’s most important poets.
