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American Literary Studies
Allen Ginsberg Papers
The Papers
Location: Department of Special Collections, Green Library
Call Number: M0733
Size: ca. 1200 linear feet
Finding Guide: A printed version is available in the reading
room of the Department of Special Collections. Electronic versions of
this finding guide are also available. If you have Microsoft's Internet
Explorer version 6.0 or higher, click here to connect to the XML version
on the Stanford server; if not, click here for the html version on the
Online Archives of California server.
Research Access and Use: Materials in the Department
of Special Collections are non-circulating and must be used in the Special
Collections' Reading Room in the Cecil H. Green Library. The Reading
Room is open 10:00am to 5:00pm Monday through Friday. Photocopies and photographs can be made of some materials in the collections. For more
information about the collections and access policies, please contact
Special Collections by telephone at (650) 725-1022, by electronic mail
at speccollref@stanford.edu or by regular mail at the Department of Special
Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California 94305-6004.
Career of Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1926 to Louis
and Naomi Ginsberg. Originally intending to major at Columbia University
in prelaw, Ginsberg changed his major to literature and studied with Mark
Van Doren and Lionel Trilling. A larger impact was made on him by his
acquaintance with Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and Neal
Cassidy; a group which was to become known as the "Beat Generation".
He took his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1948, remaining in the New York
City area until 1953, supporting himself mainly as a market researcher.
He left New York City in December 1953 to follow Neal Cassady, who had
married and moved to San Jose, California. In San Francisco, Ginsberg
became part of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, a literary circle
including Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Michael
McClure, Philip Lamantia, Robert Duncan, and Philip Whalen. In October
1955, Rexroth hosted a poetry reading in which Snyder, McClure, Whalen,
Lamantia, and Ginsberg participated.in a poetry reading at the Six Gallery
in San Francisco premiering his newly written poem "Howl." From
the 1950's on, Ginsberg based himself in Manhattan's Lower East Side,
where he rented a tenement until 1996. There he wrote the first two parts
of "Kaddish to Naomi Ginsberg (1894-1956)", published in Kaddish
and Other Poems (City Lights, 1961). He travelled extensively in Euope
during this time and produced Planet News : 1961-1967 (City Lights,
1968), based on his experiences abroad. The following collection The
Fall of America : Poems of These States, 1965-1971(City Lights, 1973)
won the National Book Award. In 1974, Ginsberg helped to found the Jack
Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of the Naropa Institute in Boulder,
Colorado, a Buddhist university where he continued to teach courses in
poetry and Buddhist meditation until his death. In 1974 he was also inducted
into the American Institute of Arts and Letters. After publishing his
books for years with small alternative-press houses, Ginsberg signed a
$160,000 contract with Harper & Row for six books. The first was Collected
Poems, 1947-1980 (1984) followed by White Shroud (1986) which
brought together the poems that Ginsberg wrote between 1980 and 1985,
and Cosmopolitan Greetings (1994). Ginsberg's books of prose include
Indian Journals (1970), Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry,
Politics, Consciousness (McGraw-Hill, 1974), Journals : Early Fifties-Early
Sixties (Grove, 1977), both edited by Gordon Ball. His longtime interest
in the visual arts - especially photography, a practice encouraged by
his friend Robert Frank - have now been collected in two books, Photographs
(1991) and Snapshot Poetics (1993). Ginsberg's photographs
were also represented in a groundbreaking exhibit organized in 1995 by
the Whitney Museum of Art, "Beat Culture and the New America: 1950
- 1965." Ginsberg was a visiting professor at Columbia University
in 1986-87, and he taught at Brooklyn College from the fall of 1987 until
his death. Allen Ginsberg died at the age of 70 on April 6, 1997 of a
heart attack.
Highlights and Research Potential of the Ginsberg Papers
The collection contains Ginsberg's personal papers through 1997, including
literary manuscripts, journals, correspondence, photographs, and tape
recordings as well as his library.
The papers are arranged in 19 series:
Series 1: Correspondence, 1942-1994
Series 2. Notebooks and journals
Series 3. Manuscripts
Series 4. Business Records
Series 5. Financial Records
Series 6. Committe on Poetry Records
Series 7. Teaching Materials
Series 8. Political files
Series 9. Religious materials
Series 10. Photographs
Series 11. Audiovisual recordings
Series 12. Computer files
Series 13. Periodicals
Series 14. Clipping files
Series 15. Memorabilia
Series 16. Posters
Series 17. Printed ephemera
Series 18. Artwork
Series 19. Music
Photographs by and relating to Allen Ginsberg
Location: Department of Special Collections, Green Library
Call Number: M1310
Size: 26 linear feet (88,000 images)
Finding Guide: A printed version is available in the reading
room of the Department of Special Collections. Electronic versions of
this finding guide are also available. If you have Microsoft's Internet
Explorer version 6.0 or higher, click here to
connect to the XML version on the Stanford server; if not, click here for the html version
on the Online Archives of California server.
The massive Ginsberg Photographic Archive consists of approximately 88,000
images, dating from the 1930s until 1997. 78,000 of these are from Ginsberg's
hand, either shot or set up by him, and are represented in the archive
by all of the original negatives, a full set of contact prints, and numerous
enlargements. The remaining 10,000 images, taken by others, document the
contemporary scene from the 1950s until the 1990s. The Photographic Archive
is made up almost exclusively of portraits, both formal and informal,
single-subject and group images. It not only provides an exhaustive visual
portrait of Ginsberg's family, personal, and artistic life, but also offers
extensive documentation of the wider international scene -- social, political,
and cultural. The collection is especially valuable for its coverage of
other writers, visual artists, musicians and cultural figures.
Allen
Ginsberg Film and Video Archive
Location: Department of Special Collections, Green Library
Call Number: M1245
Size: 12 linear feet (154 films and videos in 16 video boxes)
Finding Guide: A printed version is available in the reading
room of the Department of Special Collections. Electronic versions of
this finding guide are also available. If you have Microsoft's Internet
Explorer version 6.0 or higher, click here to
connect to the XML version on the Stanford server; if not, click here for the html version
on the Online Archives of California server.
This collection of 154 VHS tapes about the life and career of Allen Ginsberg
was assembled by the filmmaker Jerry Aronson in the process of producing
his prize-winning documentary, Allen Ginsberg, His Life and Times (1997).
More than 80% of this original material is unreleased and exists uniquely
in this archive. In addition to covering various public appearances and
performances by Ginsberg, Aronson also conducted private interviews with
Ginsberg himself as well with members of his family, his friends, and
such notable colleagues as Joan Baez, Amiri Baraka, Philip Glass, Ken
Kesey, Michael McClure, Patti Smith, and Andy Warhol.
Bibliography of Allen Ginsberg
- Morgan, Bill. The Works of Allen Ginsberg, 1941-1994. Westport,
Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1995. Z8342.5.M67 1995
- _________. The Response to Allen Ginsberg, 1926-1994 : A Bibliography
of Secondary Sources. Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1996. Z8342.5.M66
1996
- Kraus, Michelle P. Allen Ginsberg, An annotated Bibliography, 1969-1977.
Metuchen, N.J. : Scarecrow Press, 1980. Z8342.5.K7
- Dowden, George. A Bibliography of Works by Allen Ginsberg, October,
1943 to July 1, 1967. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1971. Z8342.5.D65
Selected Biography and Criticism
- Schumacher, Michael. Dharma Lion : A Biography of Allen Ginsberg.
New York : St. Martin's Press, 1992
- Miles, Barry. Ginsberg : A Biography. New York : Simon and
Schuster, 1989.
Related Manuscript Collections at Stanford
Gregory Corso Papers
Irving Rosenthal Papers
Last modified:
July 17, 2008
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