Raskin Talks about "Howl" in Bookstore Lecture

Since 1956, when it was first published by City Lights of San Francisco, Howl – Allen Ginsberg’s epic poem – has sold more than 1,000,000 copies, making it one of the best-selling contemporary American poems.

Jonah Raskin, the author of American Scream: Ginsberg’s Howl, and the Making of the Beat Generation - just published in paperback by the University of California Press – is barnstorming the nation with news about the history-making poem. Now, on the 50th anniversary of its initial publication, the poem is available in a new City Lights edition.

On March 18 at 7 p.m., Raskin will talk at Book Passage in Corte Madera about his literary discoveries, and about the ways that Howl set off the cultural wars that still rock American society. The world’s foremost authority on Howl, and one of the most knowledgeable Ginsberg scholars anywhere, Raskin has unearthed manuscripts and psychological records that tell the story of how Howl came to be written, as well as Ginsberg’s deepest, darkest secrets.

"Ginsberg’s always insisted that he had no secrets," Raskin said. "He claimed that candor was his credo. But, of course, he had secrets – especially about Howl, and about his own psychoanalysis and about the hard work writing Howl. He liked to say that he was inspired to write the poem and that it just poured out one afternoon. The truth is that it germinated for a long time, that he revised it and reworked it, polishing it like a true literary craftsman."