Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1926. As a Columbia College student in the 1940s he began close friendship with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation, and, while living in California in the mid 1950s, befriended, among others, San Francisco Renaissance poets Gary Snyder and Michael McClure. It was in California, in 1956, that he published his first volume, Howl and Other Poems.'Howl' overcame censorship trials to become one of the most widely read poems of the century. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Allen Ginsberg was awarded the medal of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 1993, honoured as Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Poet 1994 and co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, the first Accredited Buddhist college in the western world. Ginsberg died in New York, where he lived for most of his life, on 5 April 1997.He continued to write until the last few days of his died surrounded by his friends and family. His publications include the annotated Howl, White Shroud: Poems 1980-1985, Cosmopolitan Greetings, Journals Mid-Fifties: 1954-1958, Collected Poems 1947-1995. Rhino Records released his four-CD box Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems & Songs 1949-1993.

Beat movement icon and visionary poet, Allen Ginsberg broke boundaries with his fearless, pyrotechnic verse. This new collection brings together the famous poems that made his name as a defining figure of the counterculture. They include the apocalyptic "Howl", which became the subject of an obscenity trial when it was first published in 1956; the moving lament for his dead mother, "Kaddish"; the searing indictment of his homeland, "America"; and the confessional "Mescaline". Dark, ecstatic and rhapsodic, they show why Ginsberg was one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.