Poet. He was an American poet during the Beatnik era of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. His "New York Times" obituary held him as poet laureate of the "Beat Generation." His most famous 1954 poem "Howl" deals with the subjects of homosexuality, drug abuse, and Buddhism. Although his poems were often banned for obscenity by mainstream America, his writing would be eventually accepted internationally, being translated into 22 languages. In the beginning, he would read his poetry in coffeehouses and on college campuses in the United States as well as Europe, but eventually in 1995, he read his poems at Albert Hall in London. He was an anti-establishment, was a part of the countercultural movement that rejected the traditions of mainstream America, took various drugs, including LSD, and was an ultimate pacifist. Later in his career, he admitted he used drugs to motivate his writing. Born the younger son of Jewish parents, Louis and the Russian-born Naomi Ginsberg, who were part of the New York City counterculture of the 1920s, his father was a parttime poet and an English teacher. In 1961, he published a collection of poems, "Kaddish and Other Poems." The lengthy poem "Kaddish" deals with his thoughts on his mother's mental health, her long confinement in mental hospitals, and her death. She died after a brain lobotomy in 1956 as a patient in Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island. When his father died in 1976, he wrote the downhearted poem "Don't Grow Old." He had planned to become a lawyer like his older brother. While studying at Columbia University on a scholarship from the Young Men's Hebrew Association of Paterson, he met Neal Cassady, who was an inspiration for "Howl;" Ken Kesey, the author of the 1964 book "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest;" and the Beat Generation authors William S. Burroughs and " Jack Kerouac. Following his 1948 graduation, he was a patient in a psychiatric institution for eight months. After working in the corporate world, he left for the freedom of San Francisco and joining the literary culture. Although he would participate in political protests aimed to help the working class, he loved being an American. More than once, he was arrested for protesting. He often spoke on freedom of speech and gay rights agendas. His 1972 poetry collection, "The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965–1971" received the National Book Award in 1973. In 1979, he received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1993, he received the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French minister of culture. He was awarded the Robert Frost Medal for distinguished poetic achievement in 1986, and an American Book Award for contributions to literary excellence in 1990. Like his father, he became an educator as a professor at Brooklyn College and co-founded in 1974 at Colorado's Naropa University's the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, which offers a bachelor's degree in writing and literature. His other collections of published poetry included "Planet News" in 1968, "Mind Breaths: Poems 1972–1977" in 1978, "White Shroud: Poems 1980–1985" in 1986 and "Collected Poems 1947–1980" in 1984. Published posthumously, "The Letters of Allen Ginsberg" in 2008, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters" in 2010 and "Wait Till I'm Dead: Uncollected Poems" in 2016. He died from the complications of liver failure.