The Happy Birthday of Death - Softcover

Corso, G

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811200272 ISBN 13: 9780811200271

Publisher: New Directions, 1960

Synopsis

Gregory Corso has been much publicized as one of the leading literary spokesmen for the "Beat Generation, " together with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. It is true that he has been one of the inner circle of the "Beats" from the first, but many admirers of his poetry feel that it belongs quite as much to other and older traditions in world literature.

About this title

Review:

In terms of language Corso always seems to me the most interesting of the Beats . . . extracting all the power from standard syntax and rhetoric, maintaining the Beat anti-academicism. . . Put this together with the experimentalism and relevance of the Beat outlook, and you have poetry that not only shares our experience but creates it.--Hayden Carruth

About the Author:

Gregory Corso (1930-2001) was abandoned by his mother a month after his birth at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York. Growing up in foster care and on the streets of Little Italy, Corso was a juvenile delinquent who spent time in Clinton Correctional Facility, in the cell recently vacated by gangster "Lucky" Luciano. An aspiring poet, Corso was taken under the wing of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and became the youngest member of the Beat Generation's inner circle, with whom he lived and work in the Beat Hotel, a lodging house in Paris, during the late fifties. There he created one of his signature works, "Bomb", a poem composed of typewritten strips of paper arranged in the shape of a mushroom cloud. Late in life, Corso became reunited with his mother and maintained a close relationship with her until his death.

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 1960
• ISBN 10: 0811200272
• ISBN 13: 9780811200271
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 92