Young Allen Ginsberg (played by James Franco) looks just a little nervous as he adjusts his plastic-framed glasses and steels himself to recite, for the first time, a remarkable poem called “Howl.” Shifting from that epochal 1955 reading to the 1957 obscenity trial against Ginsberg’s publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and to a long interview from that same year...

  Allen Ginsberg's Howl & Other Poems, the 50th anniversary of which was celebrated in 2006, is the most famous book by a Beat poet. A close second is A ConeyIsland of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose fledgling City Lights Press published Howl in 1956 and defended it at the ensuing obscenity trial. That landmark First Amendment case established a legal precedent that protected controversial literary work with "redeeming social significance." In the aftermath of Howl, City Lights became the premiere hip press, faithfully publishing each subsequent book by Ginsberg in its "Pocket Poet Series," which also included luminaries from Kerouac and Corso to...

In 1961 Allen Ginsberg, who proclaimed just about everything to be holy in his seminal poem “Howl,” left America for India. What he brought back would become essential to American counterculture. Deborah Baker’s A Blue Hand: The Beats in India (Penguin) is exceptionally detailed regarding what happened and what did not. In the tradition of the Beats, if something did not happen, it still did. In Blue Hand, Baker found a rare path to biography, paying close attention to Ginsberg’s 15-month quest for enlightenment in India, using what might have been his own way of writing the book, had he done so. Blue Hand is a well-researched, elegant biography written in Ginsberg’s tradition of an open field of composition, where everything counts as long as it can be accounted for in one sitting and with no revision.

As vicious as it may seem to throw a baby-faced band to the tar pits, The Redwalls have likely missed their shot at stardom. Snatched up by Capitol Records early in their career, in 2005 the Illinois group released De Nova, a banal tribute to the ’60s British Invasion that was heavily promoted but indifferently received.