As a student at Columbia University in the s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac , forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism , economic materialism , and sexual repression , and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy , and openness to Eastern religions. Ginsberg is best known for his poem " Howl " in which he denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. The poem reflected Ginsberg's own sexuality and his relationships with a number of men, including Peter Orlovsky , his lifelong partner.

Template:Infobox Writer. Ginsberg is best known for the poem Howl , celebrating his friends of the Beat Generation and attacking what he saw as the destructive forces of materialism and conformity in the United States at the time. His father Louis Ginsberg was a poet and a high school teacher. Ginsberg later said that his mother "made up bedtime stories that all went something like: 'The good king rode forth from his castle, saw the suffering workers and healed them. The trip disturbed Ginsberg — he mentioned it and other moments from his childhood in his long autobiographical poem " Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg

The Letters will doubtless serve a purpose for the many scholars and students of the Beat generation. Whining, wheedling, on the make; defensive, accusatory, and sly—Ginsberg the letter-writer will exhaust and enervate you. He even knew something of this. His refusal to contain, check, or edit himself or to revise or censor his letters in any way lends each one an overblown quality. But most of us write with some cognizance of the probability of ephemerality—that is to say, with a suspicion that what possesses us now may soon pass.

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