--- title: "Howl and Other Poems Turns 70: The 75-Cent Pocket Book That Survived a Customs Seizure and an Obscenity Trial and Never Went Out of Print" description: Published on 1st November 1956, Allen Ginsberg's Howl survived a customs seizure and an obscenity trial to sell over a million copies. author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2026-11-01T11:01:14.598Z updated: 2026-11-01T11:56:50.162Z canonical: https://thequantumoflight.com/article/howl-allen-ginsberg-70-years image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/1920px-city-lights-vesuvio-san-francisco-ca-7-7-2015.webp categories: Poets & Poetry, Literary Culture content_type: Feature region: San Francisco publication: The Quantum of Light schema_type: Article about: - type: Person name: Allen Ginsberg description: American poet (1926 to 1997), born in Newark, New Jersey, and a leading figure of the Beat Generation. His first collection, Howl and Other Poems, was published by City Lights Books in San Francisco in 1956. jobTitle: Poet sameAs: - https://allenginsberg.org - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/allen-ginsberg --- On 1st November 1956, City Lights Books in San Francisco published a small black-and-white paperback priced at 75 cents. It was number four in the shop's Pocket Poets Series, it carried an introduction by William Carlos Williams, and it was the first collection by a 30-year-old poet named Allen Ginsberg. Seventy years later, Howl and Other Poems is still on sale in the same compact City Lights edition, and the publisher counts well over a million copies in print. The book reached that number after its second printing was seized by United States Customs, its bookseller was arrested by undercover police, and its publisher stood trial for obscenity. Each of those events was meant to [remove Howl from the shelves](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/ala-most-challenged-books-1990-2025-gender-queer). Together they made it one of the most widely read poetry collections of the twentieth century. ## A poem too short for a book, printed in England Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet who co-founded City Lights, was in the audience at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in October 1955 when Ginsberg first read Howl aloud. He wrote to Ginsberg that night, borrowing a line Ralph Waldo Emerson had once sent to Walt Whitman: 'I greet you at the beginning of a great career.' He asked for the manuscript. Howl on its own was too short to fill a book, so Ferlinghetti asked for more. Ginsberg added the poems he had been writing in the same long-breathed style, including A Supermarket in California, Sunflower Sutra and America. The poem itself carried a dedication to Carl Solomon, a friend Ginsberg had met in a psychiatric hospital. Ferlinghetti sent the book to Villiers, a printer in England. The first run was 1,000 letterpress copies, and they crossed the Atlantic and passed through customs without anyone stopping them. Before the book went to press, Ferlinghetti had also sent a copy of the manuscript to the American Civil Liberties Union and secured a promise that it would defend the book if it was ever challenged. ## Customs seized 520 copies of the second printing The first printing sold well enough that City Lights ordered a second from England. On 25th March 1957, Chester MacPhee, the collector of customs at the port of San Francisco, seized 520 copies on arrival and declared the writing obscene. His explanation to the press, 'You wouldn't want your children to come across it,' has been quoted in accounts of the case ever since. The American Civil Liberties Union told MacPhee in early April that it would contest the seizure. Ferlinghetti, meanwhile, arranged a new edition printed in the United States by photo-offset, which put the book outside customs jurisdiction entirely. Not a word of the text changed. While the British copies sat impounded at the port, the American copies went on display at City Lights and into shops across the country. By late May, customs had dropped its case. ## Police arrested the man who sold it The San Francisco police then took up the matter themselves. Two plainclothes officers bought a copy of Howl and Other Poems from Shigeyoshi Murao, the City Lights manager, and returned with a warrant. In June 1957, Murao was arrested and taken to the Hall of Justice for selling the book. Ferlinghetti was charged with publishing it. Ginsberg was in Tangier at the time and was never charged. Both men faced up to six months in the county jail and a fine of $500. The American Civil Liberties Union posted bail, and the trial of People of the State of California v. Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened in August 1957, with the lawyers Jake Ehrlich and Albert Bendich leading the defence. The prosecution had to prove that the book was obscene and had no literary value. The defence called critics, professors and writers, one after another, to testify that it did. On 3rd October 1957, Judge Clayton Horn ruled that Howl and Other Poems was not obscene. He found that the book had 'redeeming social importance' and was therefore protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. ## How a pocket edition stayed in print for seventy years The trial was reported across the United States, and readers who had never bought a book of poetry went looking for the one that had been put in the dock. City Lights kept printing it in the same small format, sized to fit a coat pocket and priced for students. The paperback now sells for $7.95, and a reader who buys it this November holds essentially the same book that sat on the City Lights counter in 1956, with the same cover, the same introduction and the same poems in the same order. Ginsberg wrote Howl to be read aloud, and [he performed it in cafes, bars, universities and concert halls](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/the-healing-power-of-poetry-a-medicine-as-old-as-writing-itself) for the rest of his life, at a time when most American poetry lived on the page and in the lecture hall. There is an argument that the obscenity trial gave Howl its fame, but the trial alone cannot explain why students still study it and why performers still read it on stage seven decades later. This November also falls in Ginsberg's centenary year. He was born in Newark, New Jersey, on 3rd June 1926 and died in New York on 5th April 1997. The centenary has brought readings around the world, a vinyl reissue of his own recorded reading of Howl and Other Poems, and concerts pairing his poems with the music of Philip Glass, his friend and collaborator. A first edition from that 1,000-copy Villiers run, sold for 75 cents in 1956, now fetches several thousand dollars from collectors. The book Ferlinghetti printed in England on a small press budget, with a promise of legal support in his pocket, [has outlived its publisher, its bookseller and its author](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/books-preserve-a-civilization-s-literary-and-artistic-heritage), and City Lights is still printing it. ## FAQ **Q: What is Howl by Allen Ginsberg about?** Howl is a long poem in three parts, written by Allen Ginsberg in 1954 and 1955 and dedicated to his friend Carl Solomon. The first part describes the lives of Ginsberg's friends and contemporaries, artists and outsiders he believed had been broken by a conformist, materialist society. The second part attacks the forces Ginsberg held responsible, which he gave the name of the ancient god Moloch. The third part is addressed directly to Solomon in the psychiatric hospital where he was confined. The poem is written in very long lines meant to be read in single breaths, and it became a founding text of the Beat Generation. **Q: Why was Howl so controversial?** Howl was controversial because of its open references to drug use and to sex, including sex between men, at a time when such writing could be prosecuted in the United States. In 1957, customs officials in San Francisco seized imported copies of Howl and Other Poems as obscene, and police arrested the City Lights bookstore manager, Shigeyoshi Murao, for selling it. The publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was charged and tried for obscenity. On 3rd October 1957, Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the book had redeeming social importance and was protected by the First Amendment. **Q: What is the most famous line in Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl?** The most famous line in Howl is its opening line, in which Ginsberg says he saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness. It introduces the long catalogue of lives that makes up the first part of the poem, and it is one of the most widely quoted opening lines in American poetry.