Screaming with Joy: The Life of Allen Ginsberg
Traces the life of Allen Ginsberg, the influential Beat poet. Ginsberg combined radical political action with a spiritual certainty and inner calm, derived from his devotion to Buddhism and his long-term marriage to Peter Orlovsky. From the publication of his first book, "Howl and Other Poems", in 1956, Ginsberg attracted attention throughout his life as a champion of the full basket of countercultural concerns: pacifism, sexual freedom, drug experimentation, opposition to censorship and all kinds of authority, and acceptance of Eastern religions. The junior member of the Beat poets - he has romantic relationships with both Burroughs and Kerouac - Ginsberg was much influenced by the writings of Walt Whitman and the spontaneous prose of his friend Kerouac. 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 spokesmen and a leading anti-Vietnam war activist. In this work, Graham Caveney interweaves an account of Ginsberg's eventful life with a revisiting of his major writings.