In the 1950s and early 1960s, Allen Ginsberg and his fellow Beats led an insurrection that profoundly altered the American literary and cultural landscapes. Collected here are journal entries culled from eighteen notebooks that Ginsberg kept during this extraordinary period -- thoughts, poems, dreams, reflections, and diary notes that intimately illuminate Ginsberg's actual travels and his mental journeys. They reveal a remarkable and fascinating life: conversations with William Carlos Williams; drug experiences; a chance meeting with Dylan Thomas; stays in Mexico, San Francisco, and New York; first impressions of "Naked Lunch"; bits and pieces of "America, Kaddish" and other poems; political "ravings"; and, of course, times with William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Gergory Corso, Herbert Huncke, Peter Orlovsky, and many, many others. What emerges is a truly unique personal account that will touch the mind and the soul.
"Ginsberg has been one of the most influential poets in America in our time . . . It has been a spectacular career and the thinking that went into making it is recorded in these Journals."
The New York Times Book Review
"Readable, bawdy and in places, frightening . . . . All of us may learn to appreciate the innovativeness behind the bold public stance and wide open manner which we find being worked out, or through, here."
The Nation
"An utterly fascinating revelation of one of our most important poets. It is a remarkable work."
