sold Allen Ginsberg Signed Book

Ginsberg, American poet most commonly associated with the beat generation of the 1950s and hippie movement of the 1960s, was born and raised in New Jersey where he discovered and was inspired by the poetry of Walt Whitman. He attended Columbia University where he met and became friends with writers Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Before becoming a poet, Ginsberg worked for Newsweek and as a market research consultant in both New York and San Francisco. It was in San Francisco that Ginsberg began his long career as a poet.

As a child, he was influenced heavily by the fact that his mother Naomi suffered from depression and intense paranoia and was for a long time institutionalized and eventually lobotomized. Her life is the subject of Ginsberg’s Kaddish. The poem was amazingly written in one long 40-hour session and was meant to make up for her funeral service where, due to the lack of male mourners, the Rabbi was unable to perform the Kaddish, the traditional Jewish funeral prayer. (In order for a Rabbi to perform the Kaddish there needs to be a group of no less than 10 Jewish male mourners.) The full title of the poem is Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg 1894-1956.

Kaddish was published by City Lights Books in a small book entitled Kaddish and Other Poems 1958-1960. It is this printing, released in 1961 as number 14 in the Pocket Poets Series, that we offer for sale, signed “Allen Ginsberg” on the title page. The book measures 5 by 6 inches and contains a beautiful example of Ginsberg’s signature.