American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation Paperback - 2006

First line

In September 1955, Garry Snyder-then a twenty-five-year-old unpublished poet and graduate student-wrote to his friend and fellow poet Philip Whalen in Oregon to say that he had been backpacking in the Sierras for ten days and that he'd thoroughly enjoyed the isolation of the outdoors.

From the rear cover

"Jonah Raskin's American Scream adds to the ever-growing fact and fiction of the Allen Ginsberg persona. All Ginsberg addicts will have to have this book for adulation and reassessment."--Lawrence Ferlinghetti

"The view of beat America from the middle distance has grown all too familiar over the years, but Jonah Raskin gives us something fresh: an exciting close-up of its pivotal masterwork. He shows us America at the moment of Howl's genesis, an America in turmoil, with its atom bombs and erotic anxieties and incipient alternatives, and gets at the uneasy relationship between nation and poem."--Rebecca Solnit, author of Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era

"Howl remains a genuinely magical poem, not least because its profoundly subversive power has enticed a significant part of several generations into reading it. American Scream does a superb job of setting the story of its creation and reception in a rich historical context. In so doing, Jonah Raskin illuminates much of American art and culture in the second half of the 20th century, and the visionary, contradictory, wonderful soul that was Allen Ginsberg."--Dennis McNally, author of Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America

"Like an Olympic marksman, with steady and unwaivering focus, Raskin has set his sights on what is without doubt the most influential poem of the second half of the twentieth century. When Ginsberg read the poem in public for the first time in 1955 it was clear that he hit the bull's eye, as has Raskin with his brilliant study."--Bill Morgan, author of The Beat Generation in San Francisco