also known as the beat movement, were a group of American writers who emerged in the 1950s.

Allen Ginsberg

1926 - 1997

Allen Ginsberg's family: Hannah (Honey) Litzky, aunt; Leo Litzky, uncle; Abe Ginsberg, uncle; Anna Ginsberg, aunt; Louis Ginsberg, father; Eugene Brooks, brother; Allen Ginsberg, poet; Anne

Brooks, niece; Peter Brooks, nephew; Connie Brooks, sister-in-law; Lyle Brooks, nephew; Eugene Brooks; Neal Brooks, nephew; Edith Ginsberg, stepmother; Louis Ginsberg, Paterson,

New Jersey, May 3, 1970by Richard Avedon

Hal Chase, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughsnear the Columbia University campus in Manhattan

Carl Solomon

It was banned for obscenity.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

HOWL (2010)

• James Franco stars as the young Allen Ginsberg—poet, counter-culture adventurer, and chronicler of the Beat Generation. In his famously confessional, leave-nothing-out style, Ginsberg recounts the road trips, love affairs, and search for personal liberation that led to the most timeless and electrifying work of his career: the poem HOWL.

HOWL was 29-year-old Allen Ginsberg’s first published poem—but it instantly established him as a vital new voice for rapidly changing times. At once gritty and tender, rife with sex and drugs, driven by equal parts

alienation and ecstasy, haunted by memories of childhood, oppression, and boyish love, and erupting in a rush of language with the rhythmic urgency of a jazz riff, the poem was a shock to the system in the midst of the grey

flannel, Eisenhower ‘50s. In an instant, HOWL forecast the heat and fury of the ‘60s and helped to usher in cultural shifts that are still reverberating.

The Beat Museum!

Beat Museum curator Jerry Cimino

• The Beat Museum collection includes more than 1,000 photographs, rare books, posters and artifacts.

• Many of the items in the collection were donated, often by people who knew the major figures of the Beat Generation, such as the writer Jack Kerouac.