Ginsberg, Allen | First edition, presentation copy of Ginsberg's famous work

Ginsberg, Allen
Howl and Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights, 1956

Booklet of 22 bifolia, stapled (158 x 127 mm). Inscribed by the author on title page; occasional small annotations to margins in pen. Publisher's grey-lettered black wrappers, title on wrap-around strip laid down, priced 75 cents on rear cover; soiling to wrap-around.

First edition, presentation copy given to the poet, writer, and artist José García Villa. Inscribed "[...] 416 E 34 St Paterson Allen Ginsberg to Jose G Villa after years [...]" on title page.

Ginsberg's volume includes the landmark poem "Howl" ("I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness") and "A Supermarket in California" among others. He first read the title poem at the now famous "Six Gallery reading" in San Francisco, alongside Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, and Philip Lamantia. The book's publication was subject to a long obscenity trial, and 520 copies of it were seized by US Customs and San Francisco police upon their importation into the country (the book was printed in Holloway, North London).

José García Villa, to whom the book is inscribed, was born in Manila in 1908, before moving to New Mexico to pursue his studies, and ultimately to Greenwich Village in New York City. There, he joined a community of modernist poets, including e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, among others, and was affectionately known as "The Pope of Greenwich Village." He wrote his poems under the pseudonym Doveglion (a composite of dove, eagle, and lion) and was admired, according to Marianne Moore, for "the reverence, the raptness, the depth of concentration in [his] bravely deep poems." His 1933 story collection, Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others, was "the first work of fiction by a Filipino writer published by a major United States-based press."

Villa received “numerous honors and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Philippines Heritage Award, a Poetry Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and a Shelley Memorial Award. In 1973 he was named a National Artist of the Philippines, and he also served as a cultural advisor to the Philippine government. He died in New York City on February 7, 1997.”

REFERENCE
Academy of American Poets; Villa, Doveglion: Collected Poems, ed. John Edwin Cowen

PROVENANCE
José García Villa (inscription)

Condition Report:
Condition as described in catalogue entry.