PENGUIN CLASSICS · TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS · Hardback
In October 1955, at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, Allen Ginsberg read a long and unruly new poem aloud for the first time. Within a year it had been published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights, seized by customs officials, and put on trial for obscenity. The court found it carried redeeming social importance. Howl has not been out of print since.
This Penguin Classics hardback draws on fifty years of Ginsberg's experimental, ground-breaking verse — a selection the poet himself described as gathering the most honest and most penetrating of his writing. Alongside Howl and Kaddish, the long elegy for his mother Naomi, it collects important early work, songs, uncollected poems and notes from the author that reach past the Beat Generation icon he became.
The result is both a landmark of post-war American literature and an unusually intimate self-portrait: incantatory, furious at what conformity and consumerism do to people, and entirely unembarrassed about tenderness.
No one has made his poetry speak for the whole man, without inhibition of any kind, more than Ginsberg — Times Literary Supplement
About the author
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) was born in Newark, New Jersey, the son of the lyric poet Louis Ginsberg and of Naomi Ginsberg. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, received the medal of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Minister of Culture, won the National Book Award for The Fall of America, and co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute.
Edition details
- Penguin Classics hardback, 528 pages
- Twentieth-Century Classics series
- Cover design by Coralie Bickford-Smith
- Published 30 July 2026
