A disciple of American liberties found in the writings of Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Irwin Allen Ginsberg was a latter-day prophet of freedom. Unconventional in life and art, he was a gay anarchist and Jew-turned-Buddhist who flaunted eccentricity as a badge of distinction. He was a dissenter and political spokesman for leftists, union organizers, and proponents of unfettered sex and psychedelic drugs, and he pursued the ideal and visionary along with the creative in pop culture.
Apart from the wealth of analysis attached to his work, Ginsberg’s literary doctrine was simple and personal: Poetry equals sanity. His blunt sexuality and unconventional ravings challenged notions of propriety and decorum left over from seventeenth-century puritanism, compounded by eighteenth-century conservatism and nineteenth-century prudery. Spurned by purists as a drugged-out degenerate, but admired by contemporaries as a libertarian crusader, he earned respect from a sprinkling of the literary in-crowd, including poet William Carlos Williams.
Ginsberg was born of a liberal Jewish working-class background on June 3, 1926, in Newark, New Jersey, and reared in Paterson. His Russian immigrant parents, Naomi Levy and high school English teacher Louis Ginsberg, conditioned him to buck conservative trends by supporting spontaneous expression, radical Communism, and nudity. He graduated from Paterson High School in 1943.
Labeled a gay drug experimenter while completing a B.A. at Columbia University, Ginsberg resided with fellow free spirits in Harlem. To accentuate his mounting rebellion, he studied Franz Kafka and William Blake and hung out at the West End Café, one of the first locations connected with the birth of the Beat movement. During his erratic college years, he was suspended for two semesters for scrawling obscene words on his dorm room window and allowing Jack Kerouac to stay as unofficial roommate.
After working as a welder, dishwasher, and deckhand, Ginsberg served the New York World Telegram as a copy boy and Newsweek as a reviewer. During his tenure in San Francisco, he discovered congenial artists in North Beach, which thrived at the end of the McCarthy era in outrageous, anticonservative artistic bliss. Acknowledged with a letter of introduction from William Carlos Williams, he launched the Beat movement in 1955 at his “Happy Apocalypse,” a public reading of “Howl,” an apocalyptic diatribe against modern corruption. City Lights Bookshop published Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems (1956), which effectively channeled his rage into self-conscious experimental verse. The volume’s controversial content preceded his arrest on an obscenity charge against publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who, in 1957, weathered a highly publicized trial and acquittal.
Ginsberg did not limit himself to the California scene. He taught at the University of British Columbia, appeared in twenty movies, formed a lifetime relationship with mate Peter Orlovsky, and recited verse in the British Isles, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, India, Peru, and Chile. During his residency in Greenwich Village, New York, he shared a 7th Street apartment with Kerouac and William Burroughs while completing Kaddish and Other Poems (1961), a verse biography of his mother. Ginsberg’s correspondence with Burroughs appeared as The Yage Letters (1963). He drew police surveillance while picketing the Vietnam War in New York and the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and authorities ejected him from Cuba in 1965 for protesting antigay treatment at state schools. The Fall of America: Poems of These States (1973), a lament for the poet’s deceased mother, won a National Book Award.
While living on the ultraliberal university campus at Berkeley, California, Ginsberg published First Blues: Rags, Ballads, & Harmonium Songs, 1971–1974 (1975). As Ever (1977) reprises his letters to fellow Beat poet Neal Cassady. His Journals Early Fifties Early Sixties (1977) covers travels in Greece and reveals an anti-establishment bent, which he celebrated with poetry readings at the Second Bisbee Poetry Festival in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1980. In a wacky but sincerely rebellious spirit, he cofounded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado, where he codirected curriculum and taught poetry each summer.
Following Ginsberg’s death on April 15, 1997, his funeral at Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco turned into a media circus. Old friends and admirers exulted that the poet would have loved it.
