Cover of Indian Journals

Indian Journals

The leading poet of the Beat generation and late-twentieth century American letters, a spokesman for the antiwar generation, an icon of the counterculture, Allen Ginsberg led a movement that profoundly altered the American literary and cultural landscapes. Indian Journals collects Ginsberg's writing from a 1962-63 stay in India.

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It is wonderfully eclectic, visionary, at times intensely private, and always in possession of a hallucinatory clarity that affirms Ginsberg's truly great ability, as well as his ebullient spirit.

Indian Journals took half a decade to transcribe and edit; when it was originally published in 1970 it catalyzed a large movement of young Western pilgrims to explore India and Eastern thought. This new edition contains an updated and expanded section of newly discovered photographs taken by Ginsberg during his time spent in India.

The perfect combination of text and images, Indian Journals is testimony to Ginsberg's passionate interest in Eastern religion and mysticism and contains the raw materials for some of his most important poems.

Audience
adult
Length
medium · 210 pages

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Liked Indian Journals? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Indian Journals. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. A Blue Hand: The Beats in India Shares beat, the beats, beats
  2. The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso in Paris, 1957-1963 Shares beat, beats, nonfiction
  3. Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation Shares beat, beats, the beats
  4. Her Shares beat, poetry, the beats

“People who read Indian Journals tend to reach for these next.”

  1. The Letters, Vol. 1: 1945-1959
  2. I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg
  3. Selected Letters, 1957-1969
  4. The Back Country

“If you want more of the same (travel), start with these.”

  1. Collected Poems: A. K. Ramanujan
  2. Jejuri
  3. Punjabi Poems Of Amrita Pritam In Gurmukhi, Hindi, Roman And English
  4. मधुशाला

“If it was the beat that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution
  2. The Ancient Rain
  3. The Portable Beat Reader
  4. Some of the Dharma

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg
  2. The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade
  3. Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems
  4. No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference