When Carl Wolfe Solomon met Allen Ginsberg in 1949 at the Columbia Psychiatric Institute, where both were patients, the timing could hardly have been better. For Ginsberg, Solomon's political, Dada, and surrealist experimentation provided new avenues of intellectual adventure to explore, and he was fascinated with Solomon's life and character, which he portrayed in the poem Howl, a work that made his friend at once a legend and a man who would spend the rest of his life alternately attracted to the role he played and repelled by it. In many ways Solomon is the secret heart of the Beat movement, far more influential than his own modest output would suggest. Yet despite a life story that is in many ways astounding, he is also a mystery man who has preferred to live the greater part of his life in privacy, deliberately shunning the legend that surrounds him.

Solomon...