Allen Ginsberg Was Born to Essay

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When he left home for Columbia in 1943, he remembered his past and was happy to leave his problems -- his mother's insanity especially -- behind him. Later, he noted that he had lost quite a bit by distancing himself from her. He wrote that he lost the ability to become close to "later friendly girls" (35). He believed that he had denied his feelings toward women out of fear of what happened to his mother (35). However, he was on a path to become a lawyer, although this path would change his sophomore year when he changed his major to English literature (35).

At the end of his second term at Columbia, Allen met Lucien Carr, who thought Ginsberg to be, a "shy little Jewish boy" (Morgan 37). Paul Roth had left for the war and Lucien became Allen's first serious "crush" (37). They two built a strong friendship and remained great friends until the day Allen died. It was through Lucien that Allen met William Seward Burroughs II (39) and he became quite taken immediately by Burroughs' "Old World, aristocratic nature" (41). By 1944, Allen's new friends were taking up a lot of his time and his studies were suffering (43). It was through connections to Burroughs that Allen met Jack Kerouac, who was four years older than Allen and had won an academic scholarship to Columbia, but dropped out because he wanted to be a writer like Thomas Wolfe and he didn't think that one needed a college degree for that (45).

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Needless to say, Allen was attracted to Jack's external beauty, his maturity, and his wild ambition to become a great writer (45).

Ginsberg held several jobs throughout his early years, most notably in market research, but he decided in 1955 that he wanted to dedicate himself to poetry. On the 7th of October, 1955, with the help of Kenneth Rexroth, he organized a poetry reading at the Six Gallery with several of San Francisco's poets; however, it was his electrifying reading of "Howl," beginning with the line, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by / madness starving hysterical naked," (Ginsberg 9) that inspired the Beat Generation and changed the entire course of American poetry (Jackson, Markoe & Markoe 226-7).

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