Poppy appeal T-Shirts
Subscribe
About this design
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) is cherished as the pivotal figure between the 50s Beat Generation and the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s.
He was born in Newark, New Jersey the son of a high school teacher and poet, Louis Ginsberg, and Naomi Levy Ginsberg. His early experience included dissent: his mother was a member of the Communist Party and sometimes took her sons along to the local meetings. Her periods of mental illness disturbed Ginsberg greatly, resurfacing in his great elegy to her, 'Kaddish' named after the Jewish prayer of mourning. Ginsberg studied at Columbia University where he made crucial friendships with writers such as Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.
Ginsberg's first book of poems, the extraordinary Howl and other poems was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights press in 1955 and was subject to a famous obscenity trial due to its frank treatment of his homosexuality and explicit content. The case became a cause célèbre for defenders of freedom of speech, the judgement finally overturned by Judge Clayton Horn on the grounds of the book's "redeeming social importance". Other equally subversive volumes appeared during the next few years, whilst Ginsberg publicly championed such causes as drug liberalisation and sexual freedom and forged links with a new generation of artistic rebels, including Timothy Leary and Bob Dylan. A tireless traveller and unofficial youth ambassador, Ginsberg continued to be a focus for dissent against the juggernaut of consumer capitalism.
His 1981 collection Plutonium Ode won the National Book Award and in 1993 he was awarded the medal of Chevalier Des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. Latterly he was a Professor at Brooklyn College and died in New York in 1997.
Similar T shirts:
