On 7 October 1955, Allen Ginsberg gave the first public reading of “Howl” at the 6 Gallery in San Francisco. It was only his second poetry reading and he had little reason to feel it would be successful, yet a year later he was a minor celebrity and two years after that he and his Beat Generation friends were a national obsession—loved, loathed, imitated, and parodied. That reading started the San Francisco Renaissance, too, and helped to turn the Bay Area into a literary centre. It would not be long before the Beats spawned the beatniks, who arguably became the hippies.

It can be tempting to look back at events of great historical importance and feel that they were somehow inevitable, and yet that is not true of the 6 Gallery reading. In fact, its success was wildly improbable. The poets on stage that night were mostly unknown and untested. They read difficult work that should have had very limited appeal. Nor was the gallery itself a venue one would associate with era-defining moments. And while the city held some appeal as a place for the visual arts, it did not have a great literary history. 

The 6 Gallery opened in October 1954 and was named for the fact that it had six founders: five young painter friends from near Los Angeles who had teamed up with one of their teachers at the California School of Fine Arts: a poet called Jack Spicer. In their final year of studies, they decided they wanted a place to display their work and Spicer encouraged them, suggesting that they expand the gallery’s function to include not just visual art but poetry. This was not as revolutionary as it perhaps sounds. Prior to the 6 Gallery, the building at 3119 Fillmore had been home to King Ubu, which was also an art gallery that one artist recalled was “primarily devoted to poetry reading.”

Both King Ubu and the 6 became known for their experimental art and their mixing of forms, but perhaps they both also functioned as social hubs for the city’s growing creative community. Exhibition openings tended to be wild nights where bohemian intellectuals drank and gossiped. The artists who showed their work in these places were unlikely to sell much, given that the visitors were often indigent artists like themselves, but they became places of tremendous creativity and helped form a new artistic centre in the city. A network of galleries soon opened around the intersection of Fillmore and Union, and nearby were a number of houses shared by painters, poets, and musicians. These homes were often a combination of accommodation, studio, and gallery.

At the time, San Francisco was beginning to gain a reputation as a place for visual artists and it was also known for its innovative jazz scene. Some of the world’s most renowned painters and photographers came to San Francisco to teach at the California School of Fine Arts, and almost all the jazz greats of the era could be found performing in the Fillmore District, a list that included Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie. It was a cheap place to live and its position at the far end of the continent provided a sense of freedom. In terms of literature, however, the scene was not quite as established. Kenneth Rexroth had arrived in San Francisco in the late 1920s and had worked to position himself as a figurehead. His twice-monthly Friday night salons acted as the primary meeting place for poets, but there wasn’t much else. Robert Duncan and a few others had formed the so-called Berkeley Renaissance of the late 1940s, and there had been a few attempts to launch small magazines and poetry readings. But while the city’s painters gained a degree of national attention, its poets mostly just wrote for one another.

In the middle of 1954, Allen Ginsberg arrived in the Bay Area after a spell in the jungles of Mexico. He was immediately impressed by the city’s arts scene and made good friends there, but he felt that there were no truly talented poets. He befriended Rexroth and Duncan but was unimpressed by their writing or the salons and classes they ran. Thanks mostly to his lover Peter Orlovsky and the various friends he made, he decided to stay in the city for a while and found himself an apartment in North Beach, which was the city’s bohemian centre. It was here, in the middle of 1955, that he started writing “Howl.”

“Howl” is said to have originated in a dream Ginsberg had when sleeping with a painter called John Allen Ryan, who was one of the six founders of the 6 Gallery. The dream was about Joan Vollmer, the common-law wife of William S. Burroughs, whom Burroughs had accidentally killed in 1951. In the dream, Vollmer appeared to Ginsberg and they talked about friends, living and dead. Ginsberg became obsessed with turning this dream into a poem and his various efforts led to the first line of “Howl”: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…” 

Once Ginsberg began writing “Howl,” it took shape quickly. He would expand and edit it for more than six months but even within the first weeks he felt surprisingly confident and showed it to friends such as Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and the painter Robert LaVigne. In fact, he was so confident in his new work that he began organising a poetry reading at which he could share it with the city’s arts community. 

The 6 Gallery reading was not originally Ginsberg’s idea. It was Wally Hedrick who suggested it. Hedrick was one of the six founders and he had been chosen as the gallery’s director. It was meant to be a rotating position but no one else wanted it and Hedrick became stuck in the role. The 6 Gallery was showing not just paintings and sculptures; it had all kinds of weird performances, including nude dancers, light shows, and experimental 3D films. Hedrick asked Ginsberg to arrange a poetry reading in the early summer but Ginsberg refused. He had little faith in what he was writing then and claimed that he didn’t know any good poets. However, with a draft of “Howl” written, he later recalled, “I changed my fucking mind.”

Michael McClure and Philip Lamantia were the first poets added to the roster. Ginsberg had met McClure at the afterparty of a W.H. Auden reading and even though he wasn’t hugely impressed by his poetry, Ginsberg thought McClure was handsome and hip and intelligent. Lamantia was someone Ginsberg knew from New York and had bumped into again in San Francisco. His poetry was mystical “bullshit,” in Ginsberg’s opinion, but he was a highly respected young poet, and his work had been championed by the likes of Henry Miller and André Breton. Lamantia had for various reasons disavowed his entire body of poetic work but agreed to read poems by his late friend, John Hoffman, who had died of unknown causes in Mexico a few years earlier.

Three poets was not exactly a great line-up, so Ginsberg sought the advice of self-professed “cultural minister of San Francisco,” Kenneth Rexroth. It is no exaggeration to say that Rexroth knew more poets in San Francisco than anyone else and he was best positioned to recommend participants for the upcoming reading. He immediately suggested Gary Snyder, a young Buddhist poet from Oregon, who was studying Asian languages at U.C. Berkeley in anticipation of a trip to Japan. He had just come down from a stay in the mountains, where he typically spent his summers fire-watching and logging, and Ginsberg found him fixing a bicycle outside a tiny and sparsely furnished shack in Berkeley on 8 September. 

The two men became instant friends and remained close until Ginsberg’s death in 1997. They shared their poetry that first day and quickly recognised in each other kindred spirits with complementary skillsets. In the coming months, they would learn a lot from each other while they established the core of a major literary movement.

Snyder showed Ginsberg poems written by a friend from Oregon called Philip Whalen and with the addition of Whalen, the line-up for the 6 Gallery reading was complete. They asked Rexroth if he would M.C. the event and Rexroth—always happy to be the centre of attention—readily agreed. The reading was set for 7 October and the poets began sending out postcards advertising it. The text read: 

Ginsberg’s friend Jack Kerouac arrived in San Francisco around the same time as Whalen and together with Snyder, these four poets became extremely close. For weeks before and after the reading, they spent all their free time together. Snyder taught the others about Buddhism and Eastern literature, art, and philosophy, and they all collaborated on their poems. Ginsberg wanted Kerouac to read at the upcoming event but Kerouac was extremely shy. In later years, after becoming famous, he would only read when drunk.

Cancelling the Beat Generation

Almost from its inception, the Beat Generation seemed to be doomed to failure. In and around Columbia University, a ragtag group of bohemians coalesced based upon an odd array of mutual interests. Two of them were homosexuals, one bisexual, and all were interested in drugs and subversive literature. William S.

QuilletteDavid S. Wills

On 7 October, the poets arrived at the 6 Gallery. It was packed to capacity with roughly 150 people in the small building. On the walls were strange paintings by Fred Martin, whose exhibition had recently finished but had not yet been cleaned up. There were odd sculptures made of broken fruit crates, too, including one that sat on the stage like a tiny lectern. Rexroth told the audience that it was designed for “a midget who is going to recite the Iliad in haiku form.”

McClure later said, “There were poets and Anarchists and Stalinists and professors and painters and bohemians and visionaries and idealists and grinning cynics.” Elsewhere, he elaborated: “There were elderly women in fur coats who were radical social leaders of the time, and there were college professors there, young anarchist carpenter idealists, artists, poets, painters associated with the gallery. So it was a broad spectrum, intensely radical, and intensely hoping for a change to take place.” Pretty much all of the city’s bohemian intelligentsia were in attendance and by some accounts it was the first time all these people had gathered in the same place at the same time. “Everyone was there,” Kerouac wrote, but there were some notable absences. Three of the city’s best-known poets were out of town: Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and Robin Blaser. 

Lamantia, as the only experienced poet, read first. He seems to have given a decent performance but few who later spoke of the reading had much memory of it except that he read with a strange English accent. McClure followed. In contrast to Lamantia, this was his first poetry reading, but he did not come across as shy. He stalked the stage, performing extremely experimental poems with a rare confidence. Then came Whalen, giving his second reading. He was an awkward-looking man with yet more difficult poems, but the audience was ready for challenging, witty verse that required a great deal of thought to fully appreciate. By all accounts, these were successful readings but they paled in comparison to what came next. 

Ginsberg opened with a few shorter works, but no one ever spoke of those because by the time he finished “Howl” they had been forgotten. “Howl” was not just the best poem of the night, it was one of the great classics of the era. Ginsberg began slowly and ramped up the energy as he continued, so that eventually he was chanting the recital like a religious prophet. Lying on the floor and drinking from a gallon-jug of red wine, Kerouac began to ad-lib responses after each of Ginsberg’s long lines, and before long, the whole audience was participating. In the sweaty confines of that little room, it felt like a jazz performance.

Everyone who remembered that night spoke of it as a moment of great and sudden change. There was the world before “Howl” and the world after “Howl” and these two worlds were not the same. McClure wrote:

In all of our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before—we had gone beyond a point of no return—and we were ready for it, for a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the gray, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellective voice—to the land without poetry—to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision.  

Whalen concurred: 

It was a breakthrough for everybody, actually, I think, because nobody had come out and said all the kinds of things that he was saying—a mixture of terrifically inventive and wild language, and what had hitherto been forbidden subject matter, and just general power, was quite impressive.

Ginsberg had given a voice to feelings and ideas inside everyone there. He had offered up a poem of resistance, a work that inspired all who heard it. A great many in the audience—as well as Rexroth on stage—were left weeping at the end of the poem, so moved were they by its spectacle. From that moment on, poets were copying him in style and content and delivery. In the absence of the city’s more established poets, Ginsberg stamped his mark on the scene and changed everything.

He was not the last poet to read. When Ginsberg finished, Snyder stood up and read from Myths & Texts, a long sequence he had been working on for several years and would publish several years later. Such was his skill as a poet and a public reader that he managed to hold the audience’s attention and impress them in spite of what he had to follow. Like Whalen and Ginsberg, he had also given only one reading prior to this but you would not have known it from his demeanour. He was a formidable poet and a compelling stage presence.

It is said that Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights Bookshop, sent a telegram to Allen Ginsberg immediately after getting home from the reading, offering to publish “Howl” as a book. The story goes that he wrote, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career dot dot dot dot when do I get the manuscript?” The message invoked Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had written the same to Walt Whitman 100 years earlier. Ferlinghetti swore this was true but the telegram has never been found and the two men seem to have had an agreement that “Howl” would be published as part of the upcoming City Lights Pocket Poets Series. Still, it is possible that Ferlinghetti sent the message in order to reaffirm his commitment after such a powerful reading, lest Ginsberg be swayed by other publishers. 

In the next weeks and months, the poets enjoyed and built upon their success. They performed often throughout the city and their notoriety grew. Each of them (except Lamantia, who wanted nothing to do with the emerging poetry scene) was given a reading at the San Francisco Poetry Center. However, they had to censor themselves there and they preferred reading in the boozy, free atmosphere of North Beach bars. A favourite venue was The Place, a hipster bar where poets read from a pulpit and could easily get a bar tab. Ginsberg frequently read from “Howl,” which evolved substantially in late 1955, changing in part due to audience reactions.   

It was this scene that Kerouac depicts in The Dharma Bums, with Gary Snyder becoming Japhy Ryder, the hero of the book. In that novel, he writes that the 6 Gallery reading was “the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance,” and whilst literary movements are famously difficult to define and date, that is generally thought to be a reasonable assertion. It was not only Ginsberg and his friends who read throughout the city. Painters put down their brushes and began writing verse filled with four-letter words and personal confessions. Readings became wilder and wilder. When Duncan got back to San Francisco in 1956, he barely recognised the scene he’d left just a year earlier. He called it “Ginsbergenlandt,” a term used by several other San Francisco poets around that time.  

The San Francisco Renaissance became known across the country after Richard Eberhart reported on it for the New York Times, and then with the “Howl” obscenity trial and the release of Kerouac’s On the Road, the Beat Generation became a household term. Herb Caen coined “beatnik” in early 1958 as a pejorative for the hordes of pseudo-bohemians that had flocked to San Francisco to be part of the scene. By then, tour buses were taking “squares” around to gawk at poets and painters in their natural habitat. A scene had been created, expanded, and co-opted in record time. As public attention grew, the police began raiding hipster hangouts and many of the authentic ones shut down, leaving a hollowed-out façade.

Ginsberg had already left the city he had changed so much in late 1956, and could soon be found at the Beat Hotel in Paris. Snyder had left earlier that same year to spend the next decade in Japan. Kerouac had only ever stayed for short periods and Whalen would leave in 1957. The young men who had created a whole new poetry scene somehow managed to escape before it turned sour. They missed out on the tourist buses and the police crackdowns and the endless bitching of poets who felt they should have been the focus of attention. Many of the local poets, who had been attempting to forge a scene prior to Ginsberg’s arrival, were left to endure the fallout. They were understandably bitter, especially when the national media time and again overlooked them in favour of the Beat poets who’d breezed in and out. 

In spite of all the negatives, San Francisco remained a vibrant place for poets and artists and soon became the preferred destination for young creatives. More art galleries opened. More little magazines were published. More festivals were organised. There were various experiments at fusing jazz and poetry and before long the city birthed the hippies and gave rise to the psychedelic rock scene. Hunter S. Thompson offers up a eulogy of sorts in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, writing, “San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of.” He writes of a wave of countercultural optimism that peaked there and it all began with the 6 Gallery reading.

Directly or indirectly, the 6 Gallery reading shaped so much of what followed that it’s almost impossible to imagine what our world would look like had it not taken place. Without it, would Ginsberg have become such a successful poet? Would Ferlinghetti have published and defended “Howl,” a cause célèbre that led to far greater freedom of expression for artists? Would the Beat movement have had nearly the impact it had? And without these developments, would the countercultural innovations of the Sixties have been possible? And what of all the artists who took inspiration from the Beat writers—Dylan, Jagger, Bowie, Lennon, Garcia, Cobain? Without the 6 Gallery reading, the cultural landscape of the West in the late 20th century would have looked very different.