The title of this book is taken from Henry Miller's Into The Night Life and expresses the way Lawrence Ferlinghetti felt about these poems when he wrote them during a short period in the 1950s - as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul. Learn More
Set against the backdrop of the turbulent 1960s, American Boy explores the trenchant issues of a century just passed: the Vietnam War, the disintegration of family, child abuse, adultery, divorce, the plight of Native Americans, the emergence of jazz, and the loss of innocence. Learn More
Allen Ginsberg's Howl & Other Poems was originally published by City Lights Books in the fall of 1956. Subsequently seized by U.S. Customs and the San Francisco police, it was the subject of a long court trial at which a series of poets and professors persuaded the court that the book was not obscene.
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