By Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton

By Bill Morgan

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On Sale: Feb 5, 2008
Page Count: 544 pages
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN-13: 9780306815621

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) kept journals his entire life, beginning at the age of eleven. These first journals detail the inner thoughts of the awkward boy from Paterson, New Jersey, who would become the major poet and spokesperson of the literary phenomenon called the Beat Generation. The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice covers the most important and formative years of Ginsberg’s storied life. It was during these years that he met Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, both of whom would become lifelong friends and significant literary figures. Ginsberg’s journals — so candid he insisted they be published only after his death–also document his relationships with such notable figures of Beat lore as Carl Solomon, Lucien Carr, and Herbert Huncke. Conversations with Kerouac, his beloved muse Neal Cassady, and others have been transcribed from Ginsberg’s memory, and information will be found here relating to the famous murder of David Kammerer by Carr — a startlingly violent chapter in Beat prehistory — which has been credited in New York magazine as “giving birth to the Beat Generation.” It was also during this period that he began to recognize his homosexuality, and to think of himself as a poet. Illustrated with photos from Ginsberg’s private archive and enhanced by an appendix of over 100 of Ginsberg’s earliest poems, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice is a major literary event.

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Allen Ginsberg

About the Author

In 1956, Allen Ginsberg published “Howl,” one of the most widely read and translated poems of the twentieth century. Ginsberg was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and cofounder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute.

Bill Morgan, Allen Ginsberg’s literary archivist for many years, is the author of a biography of Ginsberg and editor of The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice, Ginsberg’s early journals. He lives in New York City.

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