1926–1997

For poet and activist Allen Ginsberg, New York was full of “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,” as he put it in the famous poem Howl, and he too burned to connect to something heavenly, to find real meaning in life and to share it with others. Saul Bellow called him “the only authentic living representative of American Transcendentalism.” Indeed, his was a rugged American spirit in the tradition of Thoreau and Emerson, and like them he was that rarest of all species, a pacifistic revolutionary. He attended Columbia University in the in 1940s and was a fixture of the New York literary scene until his death.