A disciple of American liberties found in the writings of Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Irwin Allen Ginsberg was a latter-day prophet of freedom. Unconventional in life and art, he was a gay anarchist and Jew-turned-Buddhist who flaunted eccentricity as a badge of distinction. He was a dissenter and political spokesman for leftists, union organizers, and proponents of unfettered sex and psychedelic drugs, and he pursued the ideal and visionary along with the creative in pop culture.
Apart from the wealth of analysis attached to his work, Ginsberg's literary doctrine was simple and personal: Poetry equals sanity. His blunt sexuality and unconventional ravings challenged notions of propriety and decorum left over from seventeenth-century puritanism, compounded by eighteenth-century conservatism and nineteenth-century prudery. Spurned by purists as a drugged-out degenerate, but admired by contemporaries as a libertarian crusader, he earned respect from a sprinkling of the literary in-crowd, including poet William Carlos Williams.
Ginsberg was born of a liberal Jewish working-class background on June 3, 1926, in Newark, New Jersey, and reared in Paterson. His Russian immigrant parents, Naomi Levy and high school English teacher Louis Ginsberg, conditioned him to buck conservative trends by supporting spontaneous expression, radical Communism, and nudity. He graduated from Paterson High School in 1943.
