Family Business: Two Lives in Letters and Poetry - Hardcover

Ginsberg, Allen; Ginsberg, Louis

4

54 ratings by Goodreads

9781582341071: Family Business: Two Lives in Letters and Poetry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582341079 ISBN 13: 9781582341071

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2001

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

A touching look into the heart and family of one of America's greatest poets.

As a literary portrait of a father and son, little can match the eloquence and honesty of this collection of letters, written between the years 1944 and 1976. The illuminating correspondence between Allen Ginsberg and his father, Louis, begins when Allen is a precocious, rebellious college student and charts his ascension as a revolutionary icon in poetry. Their letters are filled with affection, respect, and a healthy dose of argumentative zeal-they debate every major political and artistic issue that faced America in over three decades of extraordinary change.

Their correspondence also reveals the defining moments that shaped Allen's art-his experimentation with LSD, his various love affairs and obsessions, his travels around the globe. We see, from this unique perspective, the crucial process of a poet's widening experience of the world, and how these experiences are translated into his art.

Family Business is not only a personal glimpse into one of our great poets, but also a very moving story of a relationship between a father and a son set against the turbulent world of postwar America.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Michael Schumacher wrote Dharma Lion, the acclaimed biography of Allen Ginsberg, and is also the author of the biographies of Eric Clapton, Phil Ochs, and Francis Ford Coppola. He's been researching Family Business since 1994, when Ginsberg first agreed to the project.

From Publishers Weekly:

This volume behind the clunky title and unkindly high price presents some of the most astonishing correspondence in American literature. Throughout his adult life, poet and cultural icon Allen Ginsberg exchanged regular letters with his father, Louis, himself a moderately successful lyric poet. They conversed freely about politics, philosophy and poetry (the book offers fascinating insights into the Ginsberg masterpieces Kaddish and Howl); they fought fiercely but without bitterness over Communism, the Arab-Israeli conflict and Vietnam. If such father-son arguments were typical of their era, few can have been so colorfully and affectionately expressed. Allen's letters (he addresses his father as "Louis" and ribs him for his "Polonious[sic]-like tirades") are marked by the vivid, freeform, punctuationless imagery of the beats. Those of his father, surprisingly the more deft correspondent, are wry and campily pedantic: he describes avant-garde poetry as "yawns ticked out in deranged verbiage" and delights in outlandish wordplay ("the hippies want pot in every chicken"). The letters themselves are sensitively edited, Schumacher (author of Dharma Lion, a well-received biography of Ginsberg) supplying biographical context where needed and including a few judiciously chosen interviews and articles. In the end, for all their virtuosity, the Ginsbergs' literary talent emerges as the lesser gift in comparison to their honesty and mutual affection. Anyone interested in either Ginsberg, the beats, American poetry or the '60s should not miss this ferociously tender and comical collection. (Sept.)Forecast; With widespread, favorable reviews, this should have peak sales early on and settle in for a nice steady flow.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.