INSCRIBED eleventh printing of Ginsberg’s landmark poem, number four in the Pocket Poets Series. As the title of the 2006 book in honor of fiftieth anniversary described “Howl,” it was without exaggeration “the poem that changed America.” When HOWL was published in the fall of 1956 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books, no one was prepared for the effect it would have on both literature and the culture at large. The book sold through its initial 1000-copy print run in just a few months, and a second printing was ordered from Villier’s in London. Though Ferlinghetti made efforts to temper the work prior to publication (replacing the more offensive words with ellipses), when the books arrived in San Francisco from the UK, more than 500 copies were seized by US Customs authorities for obscenity, an event which brought the poem — and its author — immediately to national attention, and led to one of the most important censorship trials of the 20th century. The City Lights edition has never been out of print, having sold upwards of a million copies, and Ginsberg’s “angelheaded hipsters“ pioneered not only a more confessional mode of American poetry, but helped launch numerous youth movements from beatniks to hippies, Situationists to punks. A handsome signed vintage copy of this landmark of gay rights, free speech, protest, censorship, and the counterculture.

$575