American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's ""Howl"" and the Making of the Beat Generation

When shy, soft-spoken 29-year-old Allen Ginsberg appeared before an audience at San Francisco's Six Gallery on the evening of October 7, 1955, he was virtually unknown, but the unpublished poem he (with mounting fervor) read would propel him to fame with the suddenness and inevitability of Byron. By the time of Ginsberg's death in 1997,""Howl"" had sold 800,00 copies, and the incendiary, visionary poem is now the subject of Sonoma State professor Raskin's thorough, accessible history. The strength of Raskin's book is the balance it strikes between the personal drama of the poem's composition and reception and the unfolding background of its historical circumstance. For instance, Raskin sketches the larger generational tensions""Howl"" records against the young Ginsberg's personal struggles both with the poetic conservatism of his father Louis and the narrow liberalism of his Columbia professor Lionel Trilling. Unlike such misfits as Kerouac and Burroughs, Ginsberg's artistic radicalization was slow, deliberate and marked with false starts and hesitations, a series of titanic struggles toward form (tempered by worldly ambition) that Raskin records with careful attention. Another feature of Raskin's book--which judiciously uses newly released journals, letters and psychiatric reports--is his refusal to either worship or pathologize Ginsberg. He reminds us that""Howl""'s singular achievements--and nearly universal appeal--are fundamentally human.