Labeled a gay drug experimenter while completing a B.A. at Columbia University, Ginsberg resided with fellow free spirits in Harlem. To accentuate his mounting rebellion, he studied Franz Kafka and William Blake and hung out at the West End Café, one of the first locations connected with the birth of the Beat movement. During his erratic college years, he was suspended for two semesters for scrawling obscene words on his dorm room window and allowing Jack Kerouac to stay as unofficial roommate.
After working as a welder, dishwasher, and deckhand, Ginsberg served the New York World Telegram as a copy boy and Newsweek as a reviewer. During his tenure in San Francisco, he discovered congenial artists in North Beach, which thrived at the end of the McCarthy era in outrageous, anticonservative artistic bliss. Acknowledged with a letter of introduction from William Carlos Williams, he launched the Beat movement in 1955 at his "Happy Apocalypse," a public reading of "Howl," an apocalyptic diatribe against modern corruption. City Lights Bookshop published Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems (1956), which effectively channeled his rage into self-conscious experimental verse. The volume's controversial content preceded his arrest on an obscenity charge against publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who, in 1957, weathered a highly publicized trial and acquittal.
