Howl: A Graphic Novel - Softcover

Ginsberg, Allen; Drooker, Eric

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0062015176 ISBN 13: 9780062015174

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2010

Synopsis

First published in 1956, Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" is a prophetic masterpiece--an epic raging against dehumanizing society that overcame censorship trials and obscenity charges to become one of the most widely read poems of the century.  

Now a major motion picture, starring James Franco, Howl was directed by two-time Academy Award-winners Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman, who hired Eric Drooker to animate the poem. Howl: A Graphic Novel visualizes the poem--stanza by stanza--with full color animation art Drooker designed for the film. 

[Printed on recycled paper with Soy Ink, this luxury art book has french flaps and spot gloss on cover.]

About this title

About the Author

Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1926, a son of Naomi and lyric poet Louis Ginsberg. As a student at Columbia College in the 1940s, he began a close friendship with William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac, and he later became associated with the Beat movement and the San Francisco Renaissance in the 1950s. After jobs as a laborer, sailor, and market researcher, Ginsberg published his first volume of poetry, Howl and Other Poems, in 1956. "Howl" defeated censorship trials to become one of the most widely read poems of the century, translated into more than twenty-two languages, from Macedonian to Chinese, a model for younger generations of poets from West to East.
Ginsberg was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was awarded the medal of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French minister of culture, was a winner of the National Book Award (for The Fall of America), and was a cofounder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, the first accredited Buddhist college in the Western world. He died in New York City in 1997.

From the Back Cover

"Ginsberg is both tragic and dynamic, a lyrical genius, con man extraordinaire, and probably the single greatest influence on American poetical voice since Whitman."

- BOB DYLAN

From the Inside Flap

"In publishing 'Howl,' I was curious to leave behind after my generation an emotional time bomb that would continue exploding in U.S. consciousness, in case our military-industrial-

nationalist complex solidified into a repressive police bureaucracy."

"I was also curious to see how [Eric Drooker] would interpret my work. And I thought that with today's lowered attention span TV consciousness, this would be a kind of updating of the presentation of my work . . . To me, the megalopolis landscapes are the most interesting--that gigantic skyscraper vision. He really captured that sense of Moloch I was going for in the second section of 'Howl'--'Moloch whose buildings are judgment!'"

"I began collecting Drooker's posters soon after overcoming shock, seeing in contemporary images the same dangerous class conflict I'd remembered from childhood, pre-Hitler block print wordless novels . . . the solitary artist dwarfed by the canyons of a Wall Street megalopolis lay shadowed behind my own vision of Moloch. . . . What 'shocked' me in Drooker's scratchboard prints was his graphic illustration of economic crisis similar to Weimar-American 1930's Depressions. . . . Drooker illustrated the city's infrastructural stress, housing decay, homelessness, garbage-hunger and bitter suffering of marginalized families, Blacks and youth, with such vivid detail that the authoritarian reality horror of our contemporary dog-eat-dog Malthusian technoeconomic class-war became immediately visible. . . . As I'd followed his work over a decade, I was flattered that so radical an artist of later generations found the body of my poetry still relevant, even inspiring. Our paths crossed often . . . "

- ALLEN GINSBERG

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0062015176
• ISBN 13: 9780062015174
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 223