‘‘Howl’’ is now available in Ginsberg’sCol-
lected Poems, 1947–1997 (2006). This edition
also contains the poet William Carlos Williams’s
famous introduction to the poem.
Author Biography
Allen Ginsberg was born on June 3, 1926, in
Newark, New Jersey. His mother, Naomi, was
a Russian e ́migre ́. She supported the Communist
Party in her adopted country of the United
States and took the young Ginsberg and his
older brother Eugene to meetings. She suffered
from paranoid schizophrenia and was periodi-
cally institutionalized in the Greystone State
Mental Hospital. Ginsberg’s father, Louis, was
a poet and teacher.
Ginsberg’s adolescence was troubled and
complicated by a growing awareness of his homo-
sexuality. He attended Paterson High School and
in 1943 enrolled at Columbia University, in New
York City. His literary influences there included
his teachers Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren
and his fellow students Jack Kerouac, William S.
Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. Kerouac, Bur-
roughs, Cassady, and Ginsberg would later form
the core of the Beat movement of writers. In 1945
Ginsberg was suspended from the university in the
aftermath of a murder committed by his friend
Lucien Carr. The immediate causes for Ginsberg’s
suspension were his writing obscenities on a win-
dow and his being discovered in bed in his univer-
sity hall of residence with Jack Kerouac, who
no longer attended the university. Although the
university authorities may have believed that
there was a homosexual aspect to this incident,
Kerouac had apparently spent a chaste night
with Ginsberg because he had visited to talk
and stayed too late to go home. In 1948 Gins-
berg resumed his studies at Columbia and grad-
uated the same year.Allen Ginsberg(The Library of Congress)
Howl