Allan Ginsberg

American poet whose Howl (1956) launched the Beat Generation into public consciousness and became the defining poem of postwar countercultural literature.

Howl: 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness' — a long Whitmanesque poem of protest against conformist America, whose obscenity trial became a landmark First Amendment case. Kaddish: a long elegy for his mother Naomi. An activist figure for the anti-war, anti-censorship, and LGBT movements.