Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) To Aunt Rose, Cézanne's Ports LINKS Literary Kicks: Allen Ginsberg http://www.charm.net/~brooklyn/LitKicks.html This site which is "unaffiliated with any corporation, university or organization" is maintained by a fan of the Beat poets, Levi Ascher, and includes a brief biographical sketch of Ginsberg, a list of his works, and links to other sites about Ginsberg. BIOGRAPHY Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, earned an A.B. from Columbia in 1948, and became one of the most influential writers of the 1950s as the preeminent poet of the Beat generation. His long poem Howl (1956), formally influenced by Walt Whitman's work, cried out against a brutal, stifling society. Because of graphic sexual language in Howl, San Francisco police declared it obscene and arrested its publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In a well-publicized trial, Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled the work not obscene. A lifelong consciousness-raiser, Ginsberg helped create the "flower power" movement of the 1960s, cultivated meditation and mantra-chanting, and converted to Buddhism in 1972. While Ginsberg was largely ignored or attacked by the mainstream literary establishment in the 1950s and 1960s, in 1974 he won a National Book Award for The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965–1971 (1972). For all his literary ground breaking, Ginsberg considered himself a follower of Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman, carrying "old-time American transcendentalist individualism ... into the 20th century."