William S. Burroughs. Diane DiPrima. Allen Ginsberg. Anne Waldman – First Thought. Best Thought

The son of a teacher and poet, Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey. He received a degree from Columbia University in 1948. The long poem Howl was the first work of poetry that gained wide public recognition. Howl has a history. Audiences cheered wildly when it was first read. Lawrence Ferlinghetti published it in England. The printed copies were seized by U.S. custom officials as obscene. After a famous court case in which the poem was found not to be obscene, the work sold quickly. Drugs, sexual confusion, the voluntary poverty of the artist and rebel, and rejection of society are some of the subjects of Ginsberg’s work. He is a poet with a significant message, and his criticism of American society is part of a long tradition of American writers questioning their country’s values. The National Book Award for poetry, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and the Woodbury Poetry Prize were all given to Ginsberg. A dishwasher, a book reviewer, and a spot welder were some of the occupations that Ginsberg had throughout his life. Allen Ginsberg died of cancer in 1997. 030

It was almost as if he had been overtaken by respectability when he reached his seventieth birthday, despite having lived a controversial life as a leading member of the Beat Generation and a daring writer of literary experiments. The grandson of the man who invented the adding machine and a descendant of Robert E. Lee of Civil War fame was born in 1914. He was a student at Harvard University. While living a bohemian life in association with such Beat writers as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, William Lee became addicted to morphine and published his first novel as half of an Ace Double Books paperback. The introduction of many of the themes, settings, characters, and amoral postures that became prominent with Naked Lunch and its successors may be seen as the beginning of his later fiction. Naked Lunch first appeared in Paris under the Olympia Press imprint in 1959 after the American publishers refused to accept the manuscript. The International Writers Conference held in Edinburgh in 1962 was called attention to by Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer. Some of the more academic and genteel literary critics have been offended by the subject matter of the author. Three more novels about the Nova crime syndicate, The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express, were written after Naked Lunch. A new style was developed with The Wild Boys of Burroughs. Although Cities of the Red Night (1981) received mixed reviews, it was praised by experts as the best of his more recent novels. The obsessions with guns, homosexuality, and the terror produced by people who are addicted to power and control are all in Of The Place of Dead Roads. The illusion that masks deliberate methods of composition is what appears to be the current effect of the fiction. These include cutting-out techniques, pastiche, and the deliberate trying-out of styles derived from popular fiction genres to create literary montages that owe as much to fantasy and science as to the surrealism of avant-garde literature.