| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. By Jonah Raskin. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. xxvi, 295 pp. $24.95, ISBN 0-520-24015-4.)
There is much to admire in Jonah Raskin's study American Scream. He gives an enlightening account of Allen Ginsberg's experiences with mental illness and his battles with closeted homosexuality. Readers new to beat generation literature will find a thorough account of Ginsberg's poetics as well as a thumbnail sketch of the San Francisco Renaissance, the critical reception of Howl (1956), and a recounting of the state of American poetry in the 1950s.	1
Raskin's analysis of the historical and cultural matrix of postwar America, however, falls into the trap of the reductive dichotomy pitting the beats against a conformist culture in the grasp of a nefarious military-industrial complex. Raskin claims, "Howl awoke the middleclass Pollyannas" (p. 121). This is a fairly conventional reading of beat culture that fails to give a full account of beat racism and individualist consumerism.	2
As Raskin himself uncovers, Ginsberg's "madness" informs his creation of a poetic lexicon championing the making of an individual voice that leads to freedom from social constraints. By implication, madness equated to a new practice of rugged individualism. This new form of individualism, however, was achieved by an appropriation of "otherness" that remains troublingly underanalyzed.	. . .

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