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Amazon.com's Price: $16.95 as of 12/19/2009 23:57 EST
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 809
EAN: 9780520246775
Edition: 1
ISBN: 0520246772
Label: University of California Press
Manufacturer: University of California Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: February 06, 2006
Publisher: University of California Press
Studio: University of California Press
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Written as a cultural weapon and a call to arms, Howl touched a raw nerve in Cold War America and has been controversial from the day it was first read aloud nearly fifty years ago. This first full critical and historical study of Howl brilliantly elucidates the nexus of politics and literature in which it was written and gives striking new portraits of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. Drawing from newly released psychiatric reports on Ginsberg, from interviews with his psychiatrist, Dr. Philip Hicks, and from the poet's journals, American Scream shows how Howl brought Ginsberg and the world out of the closet of a repressive society. It also gives the first full accounting of the literary figures--Eliot, Rimbaud, and Whitman--who influenced Howl, definitively placing it in the tradition of twentieth-century American poetry for the first time.
As he follows the genesis and the evolution of Howl, Jonah Raskin constructs a vivid picture of a poet and an era. He illuminates the development of Beat poetry in New York and San Francisco in the 1950s--focusing on historic occasions such as the first reading of Howl at Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955 and the obscenity trial over the poem's publication. He looks closely at Ginsberg's life, including his relationships with his parents, friends, and mentors, while he was writing the poem and uses this material to illuminate the themes of madness, nakedness, and secrecy that pervade Howl.
A captivating look at the cultural climate of the Cold War and at a great American poet, American Scream finally tells the full story of Howl--a rousing manifesto for a generation and a classic of twentieth-century literature.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
Jonah Raskin indirectly makes the case that Ginsberg's "Howl" was the epicenter of the Beatquake. He never comes out and says that but it's clear he believes that Ginsberg's work and the Six Gallery reading in 1955, connected many strands in the Beat movement.
Ginsberg was close friends with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, the other titans of Beat literature. He had a sexual relationship with Neal Cassidy who was the inspiration for Dean Moriarty, the leading character in "On the ... Read More
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This vignette of the poetic birth of the now classic _Howl_ by Allen Ginsberg puts those radical years in cameo and also provides biographical wherewithall leading up to the seminal moment, the same moment as that of the beats, thence the brouhaha of the sixties generation, so dearly beloved of current cultural conservatives, now gone to the dogs and deserving all howling echoes still reverberating. Interesting is the early Ginsberg, and the discombobulation of his neuroses maturing into a creative ... Read More
Rating:  -
A worthwhile treatment of the history of the writing of an important American poem. However, this book is not a history of the Beat Generation. It covers Cassady, Kerouac, and Burroughs, but only insofar as they intersected with Ginsberg. This is mostly a literary biography of Ginsberg. That doesn't diminish its value, but it does point to the book's main focus.
The book is best in its focus on Ginsberg's formative years and the themes of alienation and fear that went into the creation ... Read More
Rating: -
AMERICAN SCREAM is a well-done precis of everything that was happening in American culture at the time Ginsberg wrote HOWL and in the months that succeeded his breakthrough.
Better yet, Raskin has had quite a coup and he has persuaded Ginsberg's psychoanalyst (Dr Hicks) to talk about the mental and emotional torments Ginsberg had first to overcome before he could begin the writing proper, and he has ventured into the dusty file bins and uncovered for us the actual records of Ginsberg's ... Read More
Rating: -
The myth of the Beat Generation has become cliche. That's what author Jonah Raskin has to say in this new book. According to Raskin, the likes of Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs were not devoted artists who shunned fame and fortune.
Instead, Ginsberg actively sought fame and fortune, but did so in an unconventional way. Specifically, Ginsberg's epic poem Howl was purposely written to create controversy which lead to notoriety and eventually a lot of money. Ginsberg also set up ... Read More
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Dewey Decimal Number: 809
EAN: 9780520246775
Edition: 1
ISBN: 0520246772
Label: University of California Press
Manufacturer: University of California Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: February 06, 2006
Publisher: University of California Press
Studio: University of California Press