Bill Morgan is a painter and archival consultant. He is the author of The Beat Generation in New York- A Walking Tour of Jack Kerouac's City, The Beat Generation in SanFrancisco- A Literary Tour, and edited Deliberate Prose- Selected Essays of Allen Ginsberg 1952-1995. Also for October 2006 publication, he has edited Ginsberg's The Book of Martrydom and Artifice- First Journals and Poems, 1937-1952, with Jaunita Lieberman-Plimpton, as well as Howl on Trial- the Battle for Free Expression.
"The most intimate and revealing biography of the poet to date . .
. deeply delves into . . . previously unexplored territory."
-San Francisco Chronicle
"No other biographer has given us such a totally straight
three-dimensional picture of Allen Ginsberg. It is unembedded
reportage at its very best."
-Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"Morgan's provocative and thoroughly researched new biography is a
testament to the creative fruits and personal anguish of
Ginsberg."
-The Washington Post
"By far the best researched and most thorough of the three major
Ginsberg biographies."
-Los Angeles Times Book Review
It has become almost a clich? for biographers to speculate about their subjects' psychosexual oddities. But speculation is not necessary when the subject is Allen Ginsberg, because the legendary beat poet and countercultural figure proudly proclaimed his psychosexual oddities, from his youthful incestuous impulses toward his father and brother to his little-requited infatuations with beat golden boys like Neal Cassady and his later eye for young male acolytes. Indeed, Ginsberg meticulously documented all his doings and feelings, and Morgan, his archivist and bibliographer, relies on that trove. Morgan does little to shape the material; each chapter, bluntly titled with the calendar year, simply recounts 365 days' worth of parties, debauches, quarrels and breakups, drug experimentation, all-night debates about literature and philosophy, dead-end jobs, knock-about travels, psychoanalysis, ecstatic Blakean visions, depressed funks, homicides committed by friends, jazz, poetry readings and Ginsberg's contemporary ruminations on all the above. The disorganized, onrushing flow of experience is occasionally eye-glazing, and Morgan offers disappointingly little interpretation of Ginsberg's poems. But Ginsberg and his gang Kerouac, Burroughs, Cassady et al. are such vibrant, compelling characters that this mere straightforward chronicle of their lives approaches, as they intended, a fair imitation of art. Photos. (Oct. 9) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
"The most intimate and revealing biography of the poet to date . .
. deeply delves into . . . previously unexplored territory."
-San Francisco Chronicle
"No other biographer has given us such a totally straight
three-dimensional picture of Allen Ginsberg. It is unembedded
reportage at its very best."
-Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"Morgan's provocative and thoroughly researched new biography is a
testament to the creative fruits and personal anguish of
Ginsberg."
-The Washington Post
"By far the best researched and most thorough of the three major
Ginsberg biographies."
-Los Angeles Times Book Review
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