Spanning a decade of Ginsberg's life in letters, essays, and lectures, this book includes journal entries on his encounters with Ezra Pound, transcribed conversations with other poets and artists, and notes from Ginsberg's Spiritual Poetics course entitled "First Thought, Best Thought."
Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926 in Newark, New Jersey, a son of Naomi Ginsberg and lyric poet Louis Ginsberg. In 1956 he published his signal poem, Howl, one of the most widely read and translated poems of the century. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, awarded the medal of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French minister of culture in 1993, and co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute, the first accredited Buddhist college in the Western world, Allen Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997.
