It's the birthday of Allen Ginsberg, (books by this author) born Irwin Allen Ginsberg in Newark, New Jersey (1926). His parents were leftists, coming out of the 1920s New York Jewish counterculture. He grew up in Paterson, where his father Louis was a high school English teacher and also a poet, who encouraged his son to read and write poetry. His mother, Naomi, was a Communist and a nudist. Ginsberg said of his parents: "They were old-fashioned delicatessen philosophers. My father would go around the house either reciting Emily Dickinson and Longfellow under his breath or attacking T.S. Eliot for ruining poetry with his 'obscurantism.' My mother made up bedtime stories that all went something like: 'The good king rode forth from his castle, saw the suffering workers and healed them.' I grew suspicious of both sides.'' But Naomi also had some severe mental health problems. She was hospitalized on and off with what was probably paranoid schizophrenia.

In high school, his home life was difficult, as he tried to deal with his mother's strange episodes and with his own growing awareness that he was gay. But he loved poetry, especially Walt Whitman and Edgar Allen Poe. He got a scholarship from the Young Men's Hebrew Association of Paterson to attend Columbia University in New York, where he met Jack Kerouac, William S. Boroughs, and Neal Cassady. Ginsberg got kicked out of Columbia for a year for drawing an obscene picture and writing obscene phrases in the dust on his dorm room window, to annoy the cleaning lady — he thought that she was being anti-Semitic and not cleaning his room.

During that year, Ginsberg read constantly, locking himself up in his apartment and not seeing any of his friends. He was upset by the hatred and anti-Semitism he perceived in the world, and he was at odds with what to do with himself. He had strange bouts of euphoria where he saw God and heard William Blake speaking to him. Finally, he got himself together, finished school, and took in his old friend Herbert Huncke, who was involved in all sorts of criminal activity. He stored stolen goods and lots of illegal drugs at their apartment, and was eventually arrested. Ginsberg too was arrested but pleaded psychological disability, so instead of going to jail he went to a psychiatric institution for eight months.

After Ginsberg left the hospital, he introduced himself to William Carlos Williams, a fellow New Jersey poet, who became his mentor. He worked at an advertising agency on Madison Avenue, but he couldn't stand the corporate world, so in 1954 he left for San Francisco with a letter of introduction to Kenneth Rexroth, written by Williams. He threw himself into writing, and in October of 1955 he read his new poem, "Howl," at the Six Gallery Reading — the poem that begins with the lines: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, / angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, / who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, / who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated."

And suddenly, Allen Ginsberg was famous.

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Writers who Write in Their Time

It was on this day in 1939 that John Steinbeck published "The Grapes of Wrath." The novel tells the story of three generations of the Joad family, who lose their farm in Oklahoma and set off across the country for the paradise of California, only to encounter extreme poverty and corrupt corporations trying to make a profit off them. He wrote the novel at an incredible rate — about two thousands words a day — in a tiny outhouse that had just enough room for a bed, a desk, a gun rack, and a bookshelf. He finished it in about five months. When he was done, he wasn't very satisfied with it: He wrote in his journal, "It's just a run-of-the-mill book, and the awful thing is that it is absolutely the best I can do." And he warned his publisher that it wouldn't be very popular.

Important Birthdays

It's the birthday of British satirist Evelyn Waugh, born in London (1903). He came from a literary family: His father was the managing editor of an important British publishing house, and his older brother was a distinguished writer. But Waugh didn't do well in school, and he left Oxford without receiving a degree. He tried working as a teacher, but he got fired from three schools in two years. He said, "I was from the first an obvious dud." He was seriously in debt, without a job, and had just been rejected by the girl he liked, so he decided to drown himself in the ocean. He wrote a suicide note and jumped in the sea, but before he got very far, he was stung by a jellyfish. He scrambled back to shore, tore up his suicide note, and decided to give life a second chance.
He didn't know what else to do, so he wrote a novel about a young teacher at a private school where the other teachers are all drunks, child molesters, and escaped convicts; and the mother of one student is running an international prostitution ring. His publishers forced him to preface the book with a disclaimer that said, "Please bear in mind throughout that it is meant to be funny." The novel, Decline and Fall, was published in 1928, and it was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of modern satire.

Another Birthday and a Success Story to Inspire

It's the birthday of children's fantasy writer J.K. Rowling, (books by this author) born Joanne Rowling in Yate, England (1965).Rowling grew up in rural England. She tried writing a couple of novels, but never finished them. One day on a cross-country train trip, the idea of Harry Potter just appeared in her mind. She didn't have a pen to write things down, so she said: "Rather than try to write it, I had to think it. And I think that was a very good thing. I was besieged by a mass of detail, and if it didn't survive that journey, it probably wasn't worth remembering."

As soon as she got home, she started writing what she did remember. But her personal life was falling apart. She said: "A mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. … I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life."

It took J.K. Rowling awhile to find a publisher for her novel, but finally it was published: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (published in the U.S. as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone). It started with a print run of 1,000 copies. The last book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007), had a first print run of 12 million copies in the United States, the largest first printing of any book in history. Altogether, the series has sold more than 400 million copies. She said, "I would like to think that readers enjoy my stories because they are simply good stories."

Happy Birthday Tom Robbins

It's the birthday of novelist Tom Robbins, (books by this author) born in Blowing Rock, North Carolina (1936). He's known for novels such as Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994), and Villa Incognito (2003). He says that when he starts a book, he has no idea of what the story will be. He never outlines and never revises. He just works on each sentence until he thinks it's perfect, sometimes for more than an hour, and then he moves on to the next one. He said, "I'm probably more interested in sentences than anything else in life."

Happy Birthday Gail Godwin

One of my favorite authors, Gail Godwin, celebrates her birthday today. She is 72. I think that I have managed to read most of her books. "Father Melancholy's Daughter" being my favorite. Her writing is strong and artful, her character development is superb. I hope that she has at least several more years of good writing ahead...I will be reading and waiting!