Allen Ginsberg was born on June 3, 1926 in Newark, New Jersey. His mother, Naomi, actively participated in the Communist Party and frequently involved Ginsberg and his older brother Eugene in the party’s meetings. She suffered from mental illness and Ginsberg was forced to not only care for her, but witness her admission to an institution and her electroshock treatment and lobotomy. These events plagued Ginsberg for the rest of his life and often arose in his poetry.

He graduated from East Side High School in 1943 and went on to attend Columbia University in New York City. There, his professors and especially his friends influenced Ginsberg, who had expressed an affinity for poetry in high school, to become a writer. The now-infamous group of student writers Ginsberg befriended at … [After a brief stay in a mental institution, Ginsberg traveled to Mexico and then settled in San Francisco, California] …Columbia called themselves members of the “Beat Generation” and included Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassidy. In their company, Ginsberg began to experiment with hallucinogenic drugs in order to create more visionary and emotionally truthful poetry.

After a brief stay in a mental institution, Ginsberg traveled to Mexico and then settled in San Francisco, California, where he met and fell in love with Peter Orlovsky. In 1955, he participated in a poetry reading with several other poets, an event that was heralded as the rebirth of great poetry in San Francisco. Just a year later, Ginsberg published Howl, his first collection of radical, idealistic poems. The San Francisco police charged Ginsberg and the slim volume with obscenity, but by judgement of a federal trial it was allowed to be sold in bookstores.

After the trial ended in 1962, Ginsberg traveled with Orlovsky through Europe, South America, and India, where he recognized meditation as an alternative to the mind-altering drugs he had been taking. The pair returned to America in 1963, and Ginsberg became actively involved in the movement against the Vietnam War. He also co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, a Buddhist college in Colorado, with poet Anne Waldman. He taught summer poetry workshops at the Institute and lectured at Brooklyn College during the school year.

Ginsberg continued to publish works, give readings, and travel until his death from liver cancer in 1997 in New York City.