Howl: Original Facsimile, Fully Annotated

Ginsberg, Allen ; Miles, Barry (editor); Ferlinghetti, Lawrence (introduction)

ISBN 10: 0872864510 / ISBN 13: 9780872864511

Published by City Lights Publishers, 2006

About this Item

The rare publisher's bound galleys of a City Lights edition that was 'forthcoming' for April, 2006 - but never released. Instead an edition from HarperCollins was issued later that year. A yellow sticky note has been added by a City Lights rep next to the 'forthcoming note on the cover reading 'well, maybe not!' xiv, 194 pages, xerographic printing in black plastic comb binding (mior wear). B/w facsimiles throughout. It appears that the Ferlinghetti introduction was omitted from the HarperCollins edition as published. A scarce surviving example of what the book would have looked like.

Seller Inventory # 615997

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Howl: Original Facsimile, Fully Annotated
• Publisher: City Lights Publishers
• Publication Date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0872864510
• ISBN 13: 9780872864511
• Binding: Spiral Bound
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Rare Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

In the decade before his death, Allen Ginsberg assembled the original typescripts of his prophetic masterpiece Howl, along with revisions and later drafts of each section of the poem; they are reproduced here in facsimile with facing-page transcriptions and notes. Following, and at the heart of this volume, are the poet's meticulous annotations of each verse of the successive drafts of Howl. A treasure trove of literary allusions, anecdotes, techniques of composition, as well as a veritable social history of the 1950s, the annotations offer a fascinating and unique insight into the material with which Ginsberg worked and the process by which his poem evolved. A selection of contemporaneous correspondence from the mid-1950s reveals the variety of responses to Howl in all its newness and offers a glimpse of the lively literary comradeship among Beat Generation writers. Hitherto unpublished material from a wide range of poets and critics who were involved with the poem--Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Richard Eberhart, John Clellon Holmes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Carl Solomon, Louis Simpson, Philip Lamantia, Tuli Kupferberg, Lionel Trilling, and Gregory Corso--reads like a rich and exuberant tale of the tribe. A complete bibliography of editions, translations, and recordings; first person accounts of the Howl trial and its first public reading, along with a series of remarkable photographs from the period complete the monumental exposition of Ginsberg's most celebrated poem. Ferlinghetti's new introduction highlights the impact of Howl on American First Amendment protections as well as the place of the poem as a democratic catalyst of the many movements for peace and inclusiveness that grew in the following decades. --City Lights Publishers.

From the Back Cover

The prophetic poem that launched a generation when it was first published in 1956 is here presented in a commemorative 40th Anniversary Edition. When the book arrived from its British printers, it was seized almost immediately by U.S. Customs, and shortly thereafter the San Francisco police arrested its publisher and editor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, together with the City Lights Bookstore manager, Shigeyoshi Murao. The two of them were charged with disseminating obscene literature, and the case went to trial in the Municipal Court of Judge Clayton Horn. A parade of distinguished literary and academic witnesses persuaded the judge that the title poem was indeed not obscene and that it had "redeeming social significance". Thus was Howl and Other Poems freed to become the single most influential poetic work of the post World War II era, with over 800,000 copies now in print.