Allen Ginsberg

The poet laureate of the Beat Generation, Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, in Newark, New Jersey. He was educated at Columbia University and was a longtime resident of New York City's East Village neighborhood.

 Ginsberg and the other "beat" writers are credited with starting a genre of American prose and poetry in the late 1940s that celebrated free-wheeling Bohemians skeptical of moral codes and political power.

Ginsberg along with writers such as Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Lucien Carr came to embody the anti-establishment, non-conformist literary movement that experimented heavily with hallucinogenic drugs.

 In 1956, Ginsberg published "Howl and Other Poems," a book of free verse considered the preeminent poetic work of the "beat" movement.

 "Howl" begins:

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked."

Howl, overcame censorship trials to become one of the most widely read poems of the century, translated into more than twenty-two languages.

Ginsberg became a celebrant of the counterculture movement of the 1960s, a ubiquitous figure at poetry readings on college campuses, a critic of the war in Vietnam and an advocate for gay rights. He saw himself as a part of the prophetic tradition in poetry begun by William Blake and continued by Walt Whitman.

In the 1960s and '70s, Ginsberg studied under gurus and Zen masters. He went on to co-found and direct the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Colorado. He taught English at Brooklyn College and has written more than 40 collections of poetry. His book "Fall of America" won the National Book Award in 1972.

Ginsberg died April 7, 1997, of a heart attack related to terminal liver cancer. He was 70. Ginsberg died in his apartment surrounded by about 40 family members and friends.

The haiku and drawing, below, were written and sketched by Allen Ginsberg.