On this day in 1957, U.S. Customs agents seized 520 copies of Allen Ginsberg's Howl on the grounds of obscenity. Ginsberg and his lawyers were not hopeful when they learned that the trial judge was a Sunday school teacher who had recently sentenced five shoplifters to a screening of The Ten Commandments, but the ruling was unequivocally for the poem.
Read the story in Today In Literature.
In my view, by far the best book about the Beats is Aram Saroyan's Genesis Angels: the Saga of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation. At only 128 pages, the volume reads like a prose poem, capturing the spirit of those literary times. To focus on Lew Welch, a minor figure in the anthologies, was ingenious because Welch's journey from Chicago ad man ("Raid kills bugs dead") to guru poet and wild man mystical suicide ("not the bronze casket but the brazen wing") epitomizes the issues and personal conflicts of the era. It's a lovely, lovely book, long out of print. There are lots of used inexpensive copies on the net. Treat yourself and pick up one.
In spring, 1959, I stuck out my thumb and began my own "Beat" hitchhiking adventure, which I captured in a journal I still possess. By August, I was joining the Army.
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