SOURCE: Honan, Park. “Ginsberg and Kerouac.” In Authors' Lives: On Literary Biography and the Arts of Language, pp. 231-46. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Honan traces Ginsberg's role in the development of the Beat Movement in American literature and discusses the influences on both Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

Slim, bearded, with slightly staring eyes but a pleasant face, Allen Ginsberg stood up in a San Francisco gallery in October 1955 to read “Howl.” This was the beginning of the Beat movement in American literature. The poet had been a wayward Columbia University student, but his poem was to be as famous as any since T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

England has often been more hospitable than America to twentieth-century American poetry (Robert Frost printed his first two volumes in London), and the first edition of “Howl” was printed in England by Villiers, passed through...