90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books

'I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys'

Allen Ginsberg's poetry fomented a social and political revolution, and with its rawness and spontaneity changed the course of the American lyric. To read his profane and prophetic verses, about sex, death and America, as well as the humour of his humiliations and self-transformations, is to stretch consciousness and grasp an entire era.

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was an American poet and icon of the Beat Generation. He is best known for Howl, one of the most widely read and translated poems of the twentieth century, and for his insights into the destructive forces of materialism and conformity in the United States of his time.