To celebrate Ginsberg’s centenary, our Sotheran’s shop at 8 Cecil Court will become the Allen Ginsberg Centenary Bookshop from 3 to 20 June 2026.

We will be swapping our usual stock for books by and about Ginsberg, other members of the Beat Generation (including Burroughs and Kerouac), and the writers who influenced or were influenced by them – from Blake, Whitman and Rimbaud to Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, and a generation of poets who followed.

Plan Your Visit

Location: 8 Cecil Court, London WC2N 4HE

Dates: Wednesday 3 June to Saturday 20 June

Opening hours:
Monday-Friday: 10am-6pm
Saturday: 11am-5pm

About Ginsberg

Initially shy and closeted in his upbringing, Ginsberg’s father, the teacher and poet Louis Ginsberg, provided a measure of stability and support through the difficulties of his relationship with Allen’s much-loved mother, Naomi, whose communism and increasing mental distress made for a difficult and at times turbulent childhood. Managing his mother’s illness – he was eventually to authorise her lobotomy – may have been traumatic, but it also gave Ginsberg a lifelong interest in, and understanding of, the human psyche. Much of his poetry and activism explores the thin divide between what society considers normal and abnormal.

After early struggles, this awkward, Jewish homosexual from small-town America eventually found not only his own voice but also discovered that this voice could become the soundtrack for a generation. Just as importantly, he was able to proselytise for other writers. At various points in 1945, as the Second World War drew to a close, Ginsberg lived with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. That these three roommates would go on to produce three of the century’s most important works – Howl, On the Road, and Naked Lunch – is not only remarkable, but also a testament to Ginsberg’s frenetic energy in promoting his friends. Rarely can such a small coterie of writers have proved so influential in the development and exchange of new ideas, with Ginsberg central to this dynamic.

Each of the three had their flaws, but while Kerouac’s star may have dimmed more quickly than the others, together they sparked a revolution not only in writing but in how society might accommodate radically different views of what it is to be human, and how we might live together.