Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he befriended Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.
Best known for his poem "Howl", Ginsberg denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. San Francisco police and US Customs seized copies of "Howl" in 1956 and a 1957 obscenity trial attracted widespread publicity due to the poem's language and descriptions of heterosexual and homosexual sex at a time when sodomy laws criminalized male homosexual acts in every state. The poem reflected Ginsberg's own sexuality and his relationships with men, including Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong partner. Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that "Howl" was not obscene, asking: "Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?".
Ginsberg was a Buddhist who extensively studied Eastern religions. He lived modestly, buying his clothing in secondhand stores and residing in apartments in New York City's East Village. One of his most influential teachers was Tibetan Buddhist Chögyam Trungpa, the founder of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. At Trungpa's urging, Ginsberg and poet Anne Waldman started The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics there in 1974.
For decades, Ginsberg was active in political protests across a range of issues from the Vietnam War to the war on drugs. His poem "September on Jessore Road" drew attention to refugees fleeing the Bangladesh genocide, exemplifying what literary critic Helen Vendler called Ginsberg's persistent opposition to "imperial politics" and "persecution of the powerless". His collection The Fall of America shared the annual National Book Award for Poetry in 1974. In 1979, he received the National Arts Club gold medal and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1995 for his book Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986–1992.
Ginsberg was born into a Jewish family on June 3, 1926, in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in nearby Paterson. He was the second son of Louis Ginsberg, also born in Newark, a schoolteacher and published poet, and the former Naomi Levy, born in Nevel (Russia) and a fervent Marxist. Naomi Ginsberg was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and institutionalized for extended periods during Ginsberg's childhood, including treatment at Greystone Park State Hospital in New Jersey. Her illness produced paranoid delusions and many suicide attempts.
As a teenager, Ginsberg began to write letters to The New York Times about political issues, such as World War II and workers' rights. He published his first poems in the Paterson Morning Call. While in high school, Ginsberg became interested in the works of Walt Whitman, inspired by his teacher's passionate reading. In 1943, Ginsberg graduated from Eastside High School and briefly attended Montclair State College before entering Columbia University on a scholarship from the Young Men's Hebrew Association of Paterson. Ginsberg intended to study law at Columbia but later changed his major to literature.
In 1945, he joined the Merchant Marine to earn money to continue his studies. While at Columbia, Ginsberg contributed to the Columbia Review literary journal, the Jester humor magazine, won the Woodberry Poetry Prize, served as president of the Philolexian Society (a literary and debate group), and joined Boar's Head Society (poetry society).
He was a resident of Hartley Hall, where he met other poets such as Jack Kerouac and Herbert Gold. Ginsberg said his required freshman seminar in Great Books, taught by Lionel Trilling, was his favorite course. In 1948, he graduated from Columbia with a B.A. in English and American literature.
Following a legal issue involving stolen goods in his dorm room, Ginsberg pleaded insanity, spending several months in a mental institution.
Ginsberg referred to his parents in a 1985 interview as "old-fashioned delicatessen philosophers". His mother was also an active member of the Communist Party USA and took Ginsberg and his brother Eugene to party meetings. Ginsberg recalled that her bedtime stories focused on struggling workers and social injustice, introducing him to themes of class struggle and social inequality. Louis Ginsberg was a schoolteacher and poet, known for his traditional lyric poems and encouragement to study literature at home. Emily Dickinson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were poets he loved to recite, and he was strongly critical of modern writers like T. S. Eliot.
His mother's schizophrenia significantly shaped Ginsberg's early experiences, including accompanying her to her appointments, and influenced "Howl" and his long autobiographical poem "Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894–1956)". She had written letters to Ginsberg that are embedded into "Kaddish" and contain imagery such as "The Key" and "sunlight".
In Ginsberg's first year at Columbia he met Lucien Carr, who introduced him to future Beat writers, including Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and John Clellon Holmes. They all shared a similar interest in developing a new literary ideology that rejected the cultural conformity of America post World War II. Ginsberg and Carr discussed a "New Vision" (a phrase adapted from Yeats' "A Vision"), to reshape literature and America. Carr also introduced Ginsberg to Neal Cassady, for whom Ginsberg formed a close and personal relationship. In the first chapter of his 1957 novel On the Road Kerouac described the meeting between Ginsberg and Cassady. Ginsberg appeared as the character "Carlo Marx" reflecting his sympathy for leftist politics although he was never a member of the communist party. Political differences between both parties led to tensions between Ginsberg and Kerouac.
In New York, Ginsberg met Gregory Corso who had been released from prison and was writing poetry in Greenwich Village. Ginsberg introduced Corso to Kerouac and Burroughs and they began to travel together. Ginsberg and Corso remained lifelong friends and collaborators.
Shortly after this period in Ginsberg's life, he became romantically involved with Elise Nada Cowen who was associated with the Beat circle. Through Cowen, Ginsberg had associated a stronger bond with Carl Solomon, to whom he dedicated Howl (1956) and defining the beat generation, reflecting on Ginsberg's experiences in New York and expanding on his relationship with other writers.
In 1948, in an apartment in East Harlem, Ginsberg experienced an auditory hallucination while masturbating and reading the poetry of William Blake which he later referred to as his "Blake vision". Ginsberg claimed to have heard the voice of God—also described as the "voice of the Ancient of Days"—or of Blake himself reading "Ah! Sun-flower", "The Sick Rose" and "The Little Girl Lost". The experience lasted several days, with him believing that he had profoundly altered his perception of reality and have a deeper understanding of his spirituality and the materialistic world. This became a pivotal moment in his development as it provided him with visionary themes which become central to his work. Later, in 1955, he referenced his "Blake vision" in his poem "Sunflower Sutra", saying "—I rushed up enchanted—it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake—my visions—".
Ginsberg moved to San Francisco during the 1950s, working as a market researcher. In his time there, he became associated with poets that were centred around public readings.
In 1954, in San Francisco, Ginsberg met Peter Orlovsky, who remained his lifelong partner. Selections from their correspondence have been published.
Ginsberg also met members of the San Francisco Renaissance (James Broughton, Robert Duncan, Madeline Gleason and Kenneth Rexroth) and other poets who would later be associated with the Beat Generation in a broader sense. Ginsberg's mentor William Carlos Williams wrote an introductory letter to San Francisco Renaissance figurehead Kenneth Rexroth, who then introduced Ginsberg into the San Francisco poetry scene. There, Ginsberg also met three budding poets and Zen Buddhism enthusiasts who had become friends at Reed College: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Lew Welch who became a part of the broader beat movement.