A Legal Howl Greeted Publication

“Howl and Other Poems,” Allen Ginsberg’s first collection--reissued this month in a hardcover facsimile of the original Pocket Poets edition--is the book that put City Lights on the map.

First published in the fall of 1956, it became a cause celebre when part of the second printing was seized by San Francisco customs inspectors in March 1957.

Although the customs case was quickly dropped, in late May of that year two undercover policemen purchased a copy of the book at City Lights and arrested manager Shigyoshi Murao on a charge of selling obscene material.

Publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who was not in the store at the time, was subsequently charged as well.

Ferlinghetti says none of this was unexpected: “I submitted the manuscript to the ACLU before we sent it to the printer and asked if they would defend us if we were busted for it. They committed themselves to do that ahead of time.”

It was not only a shrewd move but essential in terms of keeping City Lights afloat, he asserts.

If the purpose of prosecuting City Lights was to drive the store out of business, the move backfired in a rather spectacular way when “Howl” was declared not obscene after a trial watched closely by the literary community.

“The ‘Howl’ trial pushed everything up,” says Murao, now 70 and living in a Palo Alto rest home. “Before that, we were just a small bookstore, a small publisher.”

Ferlinghetti concurs. “‘We never took [the book] out of the window while the trial was going on. It just took off after the trial.”

Ginsberg credits the furor with bringing his work to the attention of far wider readership than would have otherwise known of it. “The censors did me a big favor,” he exclaims. “They always do.”