Gregory Corso Biography

More than any of his contemporaries, Gregory Nunzio Corso lived the true Beat life. Brought up in the slums of New York City, with practically no formal education, Corso was, in the words of the poet-critic Kenneth Rexroth, “a genuine naif. A real wildman, with all the charm of a hoodlum . . . a wholesome Antonin Artaud.”

He was born in New York City to poor Italian immigrant parents, Fortunato Samuel and Michelina (Colloni) Corso. His mother died when he was a child, and about this loss Corso wrote: “I do not know how to accept love when love is given me. I needed that love when I was motherless young and never had it.” His unhappy childhood was marked by his being sent to an orphanage at eleven and to the Children’s Observation Ward at Bellevue Hospital when he was thirteen. At that time, Corso later wrote, “I was alone in the world—no mother and my father was at war . . . to exist I stole minor things and to sleep I slept on the rooftops and in the subway.” In summarizing his thirteenth year, however, Corso insists that although he went “through a strange hell that year” of 1943, it is “such hells that give birth to the poet.”

After three years on the streets of New York, having lived with five different foster parents, Corso was arrested with two friends while attempting to rob a store. Instead of being sent to a boys’ reformatory, Corso was sentenced to three years at Clinton Prison, where he began to write poetry. According to Corso, prison “proved to be one of the greatest things that ever happened to me.” He even dedicated his second book of poems, Gasoline, to “the angels of Clinton Prison” who forced him to give up the often “silly consciousness of youth” to confront the world of men.

After his release from prison in 1950, Corso took on a number of short-term jobs, including manual labor from 1950 to 1951, reporting for the Los Angeles Examiner from 1951 to 1952, and sailing on Norwegian...

Gregory Nuzio Corso is often regarded as a principal member of the Beat generation, along with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. Born on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, Corso was the child of a teenage mother who abandoned him. Corso’s father did not assume responsibility for the child, either, and Corso grew up in an orphanage and various foster homes. Eventually, he was placed in reform school and, for three months, a mental hospital. At the age of seventeen, he was sentenced to prison for robbery, but in prison he became dedicated to educating himself. Through a program of diverse and often eclectic reading, he acquired the foundation for what became his characteristic stylistic combination of archaic language and streetwise perspective.

When Corso was released from prison in 1950, he met Ginsberg, who took an interest in the young poet’s work and introduced him to Kerouac, Burroughs, and John Clellon Holmes. Corso traveled to the West Coast and Mexico, as well as Washington, D.C., where he met Randall Jarrell, and to Paterson, New Jersey, where he met William Carlos Williams. In 1957, Corso joined Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky in a journey to Tangier, where Burroughs lived at that time.

In 1954, Corso began to frequent the campus of Harvard University, where he interacted with students and eventually published a poem in the Harvard Advocate. The Vestal Lady on Brattle, and Other Poems, Corso’s first book, was published through funding raised among students.

In the summer of 1956, as the Beat literary movement gathered force in San Francisco, Lawrence Ferlinghetti took an interest in Corso’s work and offered to...