Howl Obscenity Trial

A Dirty Book in San Francisco.

Howl and Other Poems (1956), the first book by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, had been for sale at the City Lights bookshop in San Francisco for eight months when, on 21 May 1957, local city and county police officers Russell Woods and Thomas Pagee were sent by their boss, Capt. William Hanrahan, chief of the Juvenile Bureau, to purchase a copy of the book and swear out a warrant for the arrest of the sales-clerk and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the shop owner. Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books had also published the volume. The book was variously described as "a howl of pain" caused by "Mr. Ginsberg's personal view of a segment of life he has experienced … colored by exposure to jazz, to Columbia, a university, to a liberal and Bohemian education, to a great deal of traveling on the road, to a certain amount of what we call bumming around" (by Luther Nichols, a San Francisco reviewer) or as "a lot of...

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