Allen Ginsberg: December Portrait of the Month

Allen Ginsberg with his own portrait of William S. Burroughs, New York, NY, 1986

Perhaps the most prominent poet of the Beat movement, as well as a photographer and important counter-cultural figure of the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, Allen Ginsberg (1926–97) was born into a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in nearby Paterson. He is the author of the Beat classics Howl and Other Poems (1956), Kaddish and Other Poems (1961), and, with William S. Burroughs, The Yage Letters (1963). He received the 1969 National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the National Book Award for Poetry for The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965–1971 (1972), and the 1979 National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature. In 1974, he co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Other works include Reality Sandwiches (1963), As Ever: Collected Correspondence of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady (1977), Straight Heart’s Delight: Love Poems and Selected Letters, with Peter Orlovsky (1980), Collected Poems, 1947–1980 (1984), Allen Ginsberg Photographs (1991), Honorable Courtship: The Journals of Allen Ginsberg (1994), and Selected Poems, 1947–1995 (1996). His life and work have been the subject of the recent films Howl (2010), starring James Franco as Ginsberg, and Kill Your Darlings (2013), with Daniel Radcliffe portraying the acclaimed poet.