'Beat' Poets

In 1957, Allen Ginsberg wrote of Corso, "He's probably the greatest poet in America, and he's starving in Europe." Corso's themes are death and beauty, always in American terms. Virtually an orphan, Corso was born on Bleecker Street in New York's Greenwich Village. He spent his childhood and youth in and out of foster homes. During his numerous show more prison terms, he was introduced to literature by a fellow convict. On his release, he met Ginsberg, who immediately recognized his talent and helped him. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born Lawrence Monsanto Ferling in Yonkers, New York on March 24, 1919. He received a B. A. from the University of North Carolina, a M. A. from Columbia University, and a Ph.D from the Sorbonne. During World War II, he served in the U. S. Naval Reserve and was sent to Nagasaki shortly after it was bombed. In 1953, he and show more Peter Martin began to publish City Lights magazine. They also opened the City Lights Books Shop in San Francisco to help support the magazine. In 1955, they launched City Light Publishing, which became known as the heart of the "Beat" movement. Ferlinghetti is the author of more than thirty books of poetry including Time of Useful Consciousness, Poetry as Insurgent Art, How to Paint Sunlight, A Far Rockaway of the Heart, Over All the Obscene Boundaries: European Poems and Transitions, Who Are We Now?, The Secret Meaning of Things, and A Coney Island of the Mind. He is also the author of more than eight plays and of the novels Love in the Days of Rage and Her. He has translated the work of a number of poets including Nicanor Parra, Jacques Prevert, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. He received the lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle in 2000, the Frost Medal in 2003, and the Literarian Award in 2005, presented for "outstanding service to the American literary community." He was named the first poet laureate of San Francisco in 1998. He writes a weekly column for the San Francisco Chronicle. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, the son of poet and teacher Louis Ginsberg. In 1948, he received a B.A. degree from Columbia University. Ginsberg began writing poetry while still in school and first gained wide public recognition in 1956 with the long poem Howl. Howl has had a stormy history. When it was first recited at show more poetry readings, audiences cheered wildly. It was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books and printed in England. Before the printed copies could be distributed, however they 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 rapidly and Ginsberg's reputation was assured. Regarded as the foremost port of the Beat generation (as group of rebellious writers who opposed conformity and sough intensity of experience), Ginsberg's work is concerned with many subjects of contemporary interest, including drugs, sexual confusion, the voluntary poverty of the artist and rebel, and rejection of society. He is a poet with a significant message, and his criticism of American society is part of a long tradition of American writers who have questioned their country's values. Ginsberg received numerous honors, including a Woodbury Poetry Prize, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and a National Book Award for poetry. Ginsberg was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1995 for his book Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986-1992. Ever the Bohemian, he had numerous occupations throughout his lifetime including dishwasher, porter, book reviewer, and spot welder. He died in April 1997 of complications due to liver cancer. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922. His first novel, The Town and the City, was published in 1950. He considered all of his "true story novels," including On the Road, to be chapters of "one vast book," his autobiographical Legend of Duluoz. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969 at the age of forty-seven. (Publisher show more Provided) show less

A native Midwesterner born in 1932, Michael McClure is associated with the San Francisco renaissance of the mid 1950's, and his work, in the tradition of Blake and Artaud, is prophetic in tone and usually quite experimental on the printed page. His plays, "The Beard" (1965) and "The Tooth of Crime" are underground theater classics. He is part of show more the poet's theater movement that was revived in San Francisco in the 1980's. His more recent work includes Persian Pony, and Mephisto and Other Poems. His other books include Rain Mirror; Simple Eyes & Other Poems; Rebel Lions; Ghost Tantras; Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems; Passage; and the nonfiction work, Scratching the Surface of the Beats. He was a professor of poetry at California College of the Arts, a position he held for 43 years. He was given an honorary doctorate degree as the longest-tenured faculty member at the art college. After a career of more than 60 years, Michael McClure died at the age of 87, on May 4, 2020. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

Gary Snyder was born in San Francisco, California on May 8, 1930. He received a B.A. in anthropology at Reed College in 1951. Between working as a logger, a trail-crew member, and a seaman on a Pacific tanker, he was associated with Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso and studied in a Zen monastery in Japan. He wrote numerous books show more of poetry and prose including Danger on Peaks, Mountains and Rivers Without End, No Nature: New and Selected Poems, The Practice of the Wild, Regarding Wave, and Myths and Texts. He received an American Book Award for Axe Handles and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Turtle Island. He has also received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Bollingen Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize, the Levinson Prize from Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the Shelley Memorial Award. In 2012, he received the Wallace Stevens Award for lifetime achievement by the Academy of American Poets. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

John Wieners graduated from Boston College with an A.B. in English, in 1954. He spent 1955-1956 at Charles Olson's experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina, studying writing with Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. Wieners then journeyed to San Francisco where he published his first book, "Hotel Wentley Poems" in 1958, at the age of show more twenty-four. Wieners returned to Boston in 1959 to be institutionalized, in part because of drug abuse. In 1961 he moved to New York City with the help of a grant from Allen Ginsberg's Poetry Foundation. He worked as an assistant bookkeeper at the Eighth Street Bookshop for a year in '63. Wieners went back to Boston in 1963 and worked as a subscriptions editor for Jordan Marsh department stores until 1965. Olson, a long time friend, invited Wieners to enroll in the graduate program at S.U.N.Y. Buffalo, which is where he stayed until 1967. In the spring of 1969 Wieners was again institutionalized, resulting in "The Asylum Poems (For my Father)," published later that year. In the early 1970s, despite brief periods of institutionalization, Wieners taught a course entitled "Verse in the U.S. Since 1955" at the Beacon Hill Free School in Boston. He was also involved in the antiwar movement, crusaded against racism, and campaigned for the rights of women and homosexuals. In 1975 Wieners published "Behind the State Capital, or Cincinnati Pike," a book of letters, memoirs, and brief lyric poems. In 1986 he produced a retrospective collection, "Selected Poems, 1958-1984" with a forward written by Allen Ginsberg. In 1996 he appeared with Ed Sanders at Stone Soup in Boston for what would have been Jack Kerouac's 76th birthday celebration. Also in 1996, The Sun and Moon Press released an edited and previously unpublished diary and journal by Wieners documenting his life in San Francisco around the time of The Hotel Wentley Poems. (Bowker Author Biography) show less