Journals: Early Fifties, Early Sixties

By Allen Ginsberg

Book Overview

"Ginsberg has been one of the most influential poets in American in our time. . . . It has been a spectacular career, and . . . the thinking that went into making it is recorded in these Journals." --The New York Times Book Review

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Allen Ginsberg and his fellow Beats led an insurrection that profoundly altered the American literary and cultural landscapes. Collected here are journal entries culed from eighteen notebooks that Ginsberg kept during this extraordinary period--thoughts, poems, dreams, reflections, and diary notes that intimately illuminate Ginsberg's actual travels and his mental journeys. They reveal a remarkable and fascinating life: conversations with William Carlos Williams; drug experiences; a chance meeting with Dylan Thomas; stays in Mexico, San Francisco, and New York; first impressions of "Naked Lunch"; bits and peices of "America, Kaddish" and other poems; political "ravings"; and, of course, times with William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Gergory Corso, Herbert Huncke, Peter Orlovsky, and many, many others. What emerges is a truly unique personal account that will touch the mind and the soul.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802133479
• ISBN13: 9780802133472
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.09 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

wonderfully crazy

This journal of Ginsberg, alone and with his friends, is insighful and crazy. Using long narrations and scattered poetry he lets us into his thoughts on just about everything. A must read for any Ginsberg fan.