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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness

Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness

Weine, Stevan M.

Hardcover

Literary FiguresCognitionRegional: Middle Atlantic

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1531502660
ISBN13: 9781531502669
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: Mar 28 2023
Pages: 304
Weight: 1.25
Height: 1.10 Width: 6.20 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

WINNER, 2024 BEAT STUDIES ASSOCIATION AWARDS

A revelatory look at how poet Allen Ginsberg transformed experiences of mental illness and madness into some of the most powerful and widely read poems of the twentieth century.

Allen Ginsberg's 1956 poem Howl opens with one of the most resonant phrases in modern poetry: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness. Thirty years later, Ginsberg entrusted a Columbia University medical student with materials not shared with anyone else, including psychiatric records that documented how he and his mother, Naomi Ginsberg, struggled with mental illness.

In Best Minds, psychiatrist, researcher, and scholar Stevan M. Weine, M.D., who was that medical student, examines how Allen Ginsberg took his visions and psychiatric hospitalization, his mother's devastating illness, confinement, and lobotomy, and the social upheavals of the postwar world and imaginatively transformed them.

Though madness is often linked with hardship and suffering, Ginsberg's showed how it could also lead to profound and redemptive aesthetic, spiritual, and social changes. Through his revo-lutionary poetry and social advocacy, Ginsberg dedicated himself to leading others toward new ways of being human and easing pain.

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