Inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s anger and memories of psychiatric hospitals and the madness of his mother and friend Carl Solomon, Howl was born in 1955. The poem, written in a jazzy fever, was read for the first time on October 13 at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, alongside Lamantia, McClure, and Snyder. The electric performance sealed the birth of the Beat Generation. Ginsberg howls against Moloch, symbol of an oppressive system, while the rest of the poem addresses Solomon directly, who had been institutionalized once again. The scandal and obscenity trial that followed propelled the text to the status of a manifesto.
The legendary evening combined surrealism, peyote, and rebellion. The Beats—inspired by Rimbaud, Artaud, and Mexico—fused madness, raw sexuality, and social criticism. Ferlinghetti then published Howl at City Lights, sparking a literary revolution. The work became the cry of a generation. That same year, Burroughs assembled Naked Lunch in Tangier, and Kerouac published On the Road (1957), completing the dissemination of their mythology: drugs, vagrancy, and rejection of convention.