A report on Allen Ginsberg and Beat Generation

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
First edition cover of Ginsberg's landmark poetry collection, Howl and Other Poems(1956)
A section devoted to the beat generation at a bookstore in Stockholm, Sweden
Ginsberg with his partner, poet Peter Orlovsky. Photo taken in 1978
Portrait with Bob Dylan, taken in 1975
Allen Ginsberg greeting A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada at San Francisco International Airport. January 17, 1967
The Mantra-Rock Dance promotional poster featuring Allen Ginsberg along with leading rock bands.
Allen Ginsberg, 1979
Protesting at the 1972 Republican National Convention
Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and John C. Lilly in 1991

As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation.

- Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959), and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) are among the best known examples of Beat literature.

- Beat Generation

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Hedrick, Peace, 1953, Oil on canvas, 18 × 14", Collection: Paul McCarthy, Los Angeles, CA. Hedrick "began painting flags in the 1950s, years before New York's Jasper Johns did."

Wally Hedrick

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Seminal American artist in the 1950s California counterculture, gallerist, and educator who came to prominence in the early 1960s.

Seminal American artist in the 1950s California counterculture, gallerist, and educator who came to prominence in the early 1960s.

Hedrick, Peace, 1953, Oil on canvas, 18 × 14", Collection: Paul McCarthy, Los Angeles, CA. Hedrick "began painting flags in the 1950s, years before New York's Jasper Johns did."
Wally Hedrick, War Room, c. 1967, Exterior View. Installing Hedrick's, War Room at SSU in 2002.

Hedrick was also a key figure in the first important public manifestation of the Beat Generation when he helped to organize the Six Gallery Reading, and created the first artistic denunciation of American foreign policy in Vietnam.

"The Six Gallery reading" took place on October 7, 1955, at the Six Gallery, when Allen Ginsberg, at Hedrick's invitation, read "Howl" for the first time.

Lamantia in 1981

Philip Lamantia

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American poet and lecturer.

American poet and lecturer.

Lamantia in 1981

Lamantia was one of the post World War II poets now sometimes referred to as the San Francisco Renaissance, and later became involved with the San Francisco Beat Generation poets and the Surrealist Movement in the United States.

He was on the bill at San Francisco's Six Gallery on October 7, 1955, when poet Allen Ginsberg read his poem Howl for the first time.

Elise Cowen (right) with Allen Ginsberg

Elise Cowen

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American poet.

American poet.

Elise Cowen (right) with Allen Ginsberg

She was part of the Beat generation, and was close to Allen Ginsberg, one of the movement's leading figures.

Young people near the Woodstock music festival in August 1969

Hippie

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Someone associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to different countries around the world.

Someone associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to different countries around the world.

Young people near the Woodstock music festival in August 1969
Contemporary hippie at the Rainbow Gathering in Russia, 2005
A hippie-painted Volkswagen Beetle
American tourists in Thailand, the early 1970s
– Grateful Dead, lyrics from "That's It for the Other One"
Junction of Haight and Ashbury Streets, San Francisco, celebrated as the central location of the Summer of Love
Swami Satchidananda giving the opening talk at the Woodstock Festival of 1969
A group of hippies in Tallinn, 1989
Couple attending Snoqualmie Moondance Festival, August 1993
Tie-dyed clothes, associated with hippie culture
A 1967 VW Kombi bus decorated with hand-painting
Monument to the hippie era. Tamil Nadu, India
Oz number 28, also known as the "Schoolkids issue of Oz", which was the main cause of a 1971 high-profile obscenity case in the United Kingdom. Oz was a UK underground publication with a general hippie / counter-cultural point of view.
Hand-crafted Hippie Truck, 1968
Hippie Truck interior
Timothy Leary, family and band on a lecture tour at State University of New York at Buffalo in 1969
An anti-war demonstrator offers a flower to a Military Police officer during the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam's 1967 March on the Pentagon
Tahquitz Canyon, Palm Springs, California, 1969, sharing a joint
As a hippie, Ken Westerfield helped to popularize the alternative sport of Frisbee in the 1960s–70s, that has become today's disc sports
Hippies at the Nambassa 1981 Festival in New Zealand
Goa Gil, original 1960s hippie who later became a pioneering electronic dance music DJ and party organizer, here appearing in the 2001 film Last Hippie Standing

The Beats adopted the term hip, and early hippies inherited the language and countercultural values of the Beat Generation.

Beats like Allen Ginsberg crossed over from the beat movement and became fixtures of the burgeoning hippie and anti-war movements.

Dylan at Azkena Rock Festival in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, in June 2010

Bob Dylan

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American singer-songwriter.

American singer-songwriter.

Dylan at Azkena Rock Festival in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, in June 2010
Dylan at Azkena Rock Festival in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, in June 2010
The Zimmerman family home in Hibbing, Minnesota
Dylan with Joan Baez during the civil rights "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom", August 28, 1963
Bobby Dylan, as the college yearbook lists him: St. Lawrence University, upstate New York, November 1963
The cinéma vérité documentary Dont Look Back (1967) follows Dylan on his 1965 tour of England. An early music video for "Subterranean Homesick Blues" was used as the film's opening segment.
Dylan in 1966
Bob Dylan and the Band commenced their 1974 tour in Chicago on January 3.
Bob Dylan with Allen Ginsberg on the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975. Photo: Elsa Dorfman
Dylan performing in the De Kuip Stadium, Rotterdam, June 23, 1978
Dylan in Toronto April 18, 1980
Dylan in Barcelona, Spain, 1984
Dylan performs during the 1996 Lida Festival in Stockholm
Dylan, the Spectrum, 2007
Bob Dylan performs at Air Canada Centre, Toronto, November 7, 2006
Dylan and the Obamas at the White House, after a performance celebrating music from the civil rights movement (February 9, 2010)
Dylan performing at Finsbury Park, London, June 18, 2011
President Obama presents Dylan with a Medal of Freedom, May 2012
Dylan mural in Minneapolis by Eduardo Kobra

His newest direction was signaled by two lengthy songs: the impressionistic "Chimes of Freedom", which sets social commentary against a metaphorical landscape in a style characterized by Allen Ginsberg as "chains of flashing images," and "My Back Pages", which attacks the simplistic and arch seriousness of his own earlier topical songs and seems to predict the backlash he was about to encounter from his former champions as he took a new direction.

The first single, "Subterranean Homesick Blues", owed much to Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business"; its free-association lyrics described as harking back to the energy of beat poetry and as a forerunner of rap and hip-hop.

Joplin in 1970

Janis Joplin

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American singer and musician.

American singer and musician.

Joplin in 1970
Joplin in 1960 as a graduating senior in high school
Joplin (seated) with Big Brother and the Holding Company, c. 1966–1967 photograph Bob Seidemann
Joplin performs with Tom Jones on This Is Tom Jones in late 1969
Newspaper review of Joplin's 1969 concert at Vets Memorial Auditorium in Columbus, Ohio includes the fact that before it started she walked to the lobby and watched audience members arrive.
Janis Joplin performing at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island in July 1968
Joplin photographed by Jim Marshall in 1969, one year before her death

Joplin cultivated a rebellious manner and styled herself partly after her female blues heroines and partly after the Beat poets.

Janis Joplin and Big Brother performed there along with the Hare Krishna founder Bhaktivedanta Swami, Allen Ginsberg, Moby Grape, and the Grateful Dead, donating proceeds to the Krishna temple.

Baraka in 2013

Amiri Baraka

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American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays and music criticism.

American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays and music criticism.

Baraka in 2013
Baraka addressing the Malcolm X Festival from the Black Dot Stage in San Antonio Park, Oakland, California, while performing with Marcel Diallo and his Electric Church Band

While he was stationed in Puerto Rico, he worked at the base library, which allowed him ample reading time, and it was here that, inspired by Beat poets back in America, he began to write poetry.

He and Hettie founded Totem Press, which published such Beat poets as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

Johnson at the 2007 Brooklyn Book Festival

Joyce Johnson (author)

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American author of fiction and nonfiction.

American author of fiction and nonfiction.

Johnson at the 2007 Brooklyn Book Festival

She was born Joyce Glassman in 1935 to a Jewish family in New York City and raised in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, a few blocks from the apartment of Joan Vollmer Adams where William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac lived from 1944 to 1946.

Living in the heart of the 1950s' Beat Movement, her works are very significant in portraying the life of women during the era where most of the time, women's voices were backgrounded in the stories written by the Beat male authors like Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac.

Kaddish (poem)

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"Kaddish" also known as "Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894–1956)" is a poem by Beat writer Allen Ginsberg about his mother Naomi and her death on June 9, 1956.

Whitman in 1887

Walt Whitman

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American poet, essayist and journalist.

American poet, essayist and journalist.

Whitman in 1887
Whitman at age 28
Walt Whitman, age 35, from the frontispiece to Leaves of Grass, Fulton St., Brooklyn, N.Y., steel engraving by Samuel Hollyer from a lost daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison
Whitman as photographed by Mathew Brady
Walt Whitman's handwritten manuscript for "Broadway, 1861"
Whitman spent his last years at his home in Camden, New Jersey. Today, it is open to the public as the Walt Whitman House.
Portrait of Whitman by Thomas Eakins, 1887–88
Walt Whitman
Whitman and Peter Doyle, one of the men with whom Whitman was believed to have had an intimate relationship
Walt Whitman and Bill Duckett
Whitman was honored on a 'Famous Americans Series' Postal issue, in 1940.
Walt Whitman statue at the Walt Whitman Bridge Entrance, 3100 S Broad St, Philadelphia PA

Whitman's vagabond lifestyle was adopted by the Beat movement and its leaders such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in the 1950s and 1960s as well as anti-war poets like Adrienne Rich, Alicia Ostriker, and Gary Snyder.