Books: Odd Man In: Allen Ginsberg in America

ALLEN GINSBERG IN AMERICA by Jane Kramer. 202 pages. Random House. $4.95.

In 1956, his anguished protest poem Howl ("I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness . . .") set the stage for the Beat scene. Since then, often unwashed yet somehow steeped in cleansing waves of culture, sometimes naked but never far removed from the whole cloth of bohemian and Brahman tradition, Allen Ginsberg has gained celebrity not only as a poet but as a practicing pansexualist and pioneer in psychedelia. He has also preached all manner of revolutionary activities that could lead to the overthrow of...

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