Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg, born in 1926 in Newark, was a poet before he was ever a radio act, and one of the great troublemakers of American letters. At Columbia University he fell in with Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Lucien Carr, and together they formed the core of the Beat Generation. "Howl" made him famous and made him a target: copies were seized by San Francisco police and US Customs, and the obscenity trial that followed in 1957 ended with a judge ruling the poem was not obscene.

He spent the rest of his life pushing back against militarism, materialism and sexual repression, a practicing Buddhist who bought his clothes secondhand, lived in the East Village and joined protests from the Vietnam War to the war on drugs. The Fall of America shared the National Book Award for Poetry in 1974, and Cosmopolitan Greetings made him a Pulitzer finalist in 1995.

"Ballad of the Skeletons", which found its way onto the radio in 1996, is a late-career spoken-word piece that carried the old Beat's voice onto rock radio a year before his death in 1997.

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