Allen Ginsberg

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Allen Ginsberg first read Howl aloud in public on October 7, 1955, at the Six Gallery, a converted auto repair shop in San Francisco, at a reading the painter Wally Hedrick first proposed and organized, with poet Kenneth Rexroth serving as master of ceremonies, featuring five other readers including Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. Jack Kerouac was in the audience and, by most accounts, helped stir the crowd's response by shouting Go, go and passing around jugs of wine as Ginsberg read. The reading is widely treated as the public debut of the Beat movement as a literary scene, and City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, also in attendance, wired Ginsberg soon after offering to publish the poem.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

When City Lights Books published Howl and Other Poems in 1956, United States customs officials seized 520 copies of a shipment printed in England on March 25, 1957, calling the title poem obscene. San Francisco police then arrested City Lights manager Shigeyoshi Murao for selling the book and issued a warrant for publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who was booked on the same charge. The resulting 1957 obscenity trial turned on expert testimony from literary scholars who argued the poem had genuine redeeming social importance, and Municipal Judge Clayton W. Horn ultimately ruled in Ferlinghetti's favor, finding the poem not obscene. The verdict is remembered as an early legal foothold for the Beat Generation's most confrontational writing and for challenging American obscenity law more broadly.