How Drugs Helped Allen Ginsberg to be Creative

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After Ginsberg’s high school graduation in June of 1943 he immediately enrolled in Columbia University in New York City on a scholarship from the Young Men’s Hebrew Association in Paterson. In his early journals, he confessed that one of the primary reasons he applied to Columbia was because his secret crush, Paul Roth, had gone to Columbia a year earlier (Ginsberg). It was this secret, the proximity to his home in New Jersey, its credibility as a university, and the fact that it was his father’s alma mater that made Columbia Ginsberg’s first choice in colleges. He began classes right after graduation during the summer term, endeavoring to become a labor lawyer. He did, however, continue to contribute to literature and worked to pursue his hobby of writing. He not only submitted works for Columbia’s literary journal, the Columbia Review, but he also wrote for the Jester humor magazine, served as president for Columbia’s literary and debate group, the Philolexian Society, and won the Woodberry Poetry Prize in 1946 (Miles). Despite his growing success as a writer, Ginsberg continued pursuing law. One might think that his time as a law student at Columbia was a waste considering his passion for writing and the success it brought him later in life. On the contrary, his passion for law was nearly as powerful as his passion for literature and instilled in him the fierce opinions and beliefs that he used in his work and that he fought for as a social activist. Ginsberg would surely have become a lawyer had he not met the friends that would one day be known as the “Beat Generation” writers that changed the direction of his life forever.
Its no surprise that drugs played an important--whether beneficial or otherwise--part in Ginsberg's adu...

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...nd Ginsberg come to celebrate his triumph over censorship, support of the arts, and the ways “Howl” revolutionized literature and opened doors for individuals who longed to reveal their eccentricities before it was considered “appropriate” to do so. The fact that festivals like these are permitted to exist, that people still gather in Ginsberg’s name, that people are allowed to live with out restrictions because of his work are just some examples of how this man’s legacy lives on far longer than he could have ever imagined. Allen Ginsberg led a band of misfits through a re-imagination of literature and, despite the controversy he inspired and through his determination to avoid censors, those misfits changed the way literature was written and how the world responded to literature forever. There has and will never be a writer to affect as many lives as Allen Ginsberg.

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