In part thanks to early friendships with renegades such as Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and William Burroughs, and his publication of the electrifying and brilliant Howl, Allen Ginsberg occupies a significant and enduring position in American literature. Following Ginsberg's death in 1997, Barry Miles, drawing both on his long friendship with the poet and on Ginsberg's journals and correspondence, thoroughly updated and revised his immensely readable account of one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary poets.