Allen Ginsberg Influences

World War II had a profound affect on all phases of American life and is classified as the worst war in American history. Allen Ginsberg is one of the most prominent writers during the Beat Movement after World War II. The Beat movement was a very important literary period in history. Ginsberg and other poets used World War II references to display culture the 1950s. He writes about his views on American society and the toll World War II took on America as a whole. Allen Ginsberg uses culture and political references in “Howl”, “America”, and “A Supermarket in California” to show the political unrest in the post World War II United States.
Throughout his life Allen Ginsberg supported communism as an international workers movement and displayed many of his Marxist views in his works. He wrote in the time period after World War II called the Beat Movement. He believed in individual freedom, Zen Buddhism, and the free use of drugs. Beat movement writers stressed personal release and purification. They offered a radical critic for American middle class values in the 1950s (Quinn). Jack Kerouac, Walt Whitman and other Beat Movement writers greatly influenced his works.
In high school, Ginsberg started extensively writing in a journal and became a poet at Columbia University. He grew up with strong influences from his family. His father and brother were both poets and journalists and his mother was an active member of the Communist party of America. In february of 1949 Ginsberg was arrested for storing stolen property and sent to a mental hospital. After getting out of the mental hospital he met a famous author by the name of William Carlos Williams and started to send him poems. This jump started his career and he started helping other poets and writing his own poems