Screaming With Joy: The Life of Allen Ginsberg - Hardcover

Graham Caveney is the author of Gentleman Junkie: A Biography of William Burroughs and the coauthor of Shopping in Space, a report on the American brat-pack writers.

lly illustrated tribute to Allen Ginsberg--the best-known American poet of the post-war generation, mother of the Beats, and walking embodiment of Western counterculture.

Ginsberg's poetry, influenced by the writings of Walt Whitman and the spontaneous prose of his friend Jack Kerouac, is open, forthright, didactic, and written fast without revision. Much of his writing has a raw, confessional quality appropriate to his roles as one of the first gay spokespeople and a leading anti-Vietnam War activist.

From the publication of his first book, Howl and Other Poems, in 1956, Ginsberg became known as the champion of counterculture concerns: sexual freedom, pacifism, drug experimentation, opposition to censorship and authority, and acceptance of Eastern religions. The youngest of the Beat writers, Ginsberg was a lover to both William Burroughs and Kerouac and acted as the prophet and public face of the group--serving as Kerouac's unofficial agent for On the Road