Hans van Dijk for Anefo · CC0

Wrote "Howl" in 1955, a long, unpunctuated poem of rage against American conformity and militarism that named its own author's homosexuality at a time when sodomy laws criminalized it in every state. San Francisco police seized copies the following year and City Lights' publisher was tried for obscenity; the judge ruled the poem had redeeming social importance, a decision that widened the legal space for explicit literature in America. Ginsberg became the central public figure of the Beat Generation and later a serious, long-practicing student of Tibetan Buddhism.