The Yage Letters

ALLEN GINSBERG (1926–1997) overcame censorship with his signal poem Howl, now one of the most widely read poems of the century. Crowned Prague May King in 1965, then expelled by Czech police and simultaneously placed on the FBI's Dangerous Security List, Ginsberg traveled to and taught in the People's Republic of China, the Soviet Union, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe, where he received Yugoslavia's Struga Poetry Festival "Golden Wreath" in 1986. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, the first accredited Buddhist college in the Western world. He was winner of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award given by the University of Chicago in 1991 and in 1993 received France's Chevalier de l'Ordre des Artes et des Lettres. Ginsberg is also the editor for Poems for the Nation. Ginsberg died of liver cancer, April 5, 1997, in his home in New York City.

William S. Burroughs was born on February 5, 1914 in St Louis. In work and in life Burroughs expressed a lifelong subversion of the morality, politics and economics of modern America. To escape those conditions, and in particular his treatment as a homosexual and a drug-user, Burroughs left his homeland in 1950, and soon after began writing. By the time of his death he was widely recognised as one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the twentieth century. His numerous books include Naked Lunch, Junky, Queer, Nova Express, Interzone, The Wild Boys, The Ticket That Exploded and The Soft Machine. After living in Mexico City, Tangier, Paris, and London, Burroughs finally returned to America in 1974. He died in 1997.