HOWL: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions

New York: Harper & Row, 1986. First printing. Very good plus in near fine jacket.. Lavishly inscribed first edition of this 30th-anniversary critical compilation of HOWL drafts, annotations, critical responses, and selected poetic precursors. A generation-defining poem, "Howl" is the most important of the postwar period, and one that pioneered not only a more confessional mode of American verse, but influenced innumerable youth movements: from beatniks to hippies, Situationists to punks. Edited by Miles and assembled with Ginsberg's own annotations and prefatory Reader's Guide, which describes this facsimile edition as a "'How to' book, a handbook for composition of one kind of expansive poetry: its process, basic sorting and judgment, revision, transposition of artful choices." Appendices include contemporary accounts of the poem's first public reading, the legal history of HOWL, and Bill Morgan's bibliography. Original blind-stamped tan cloth with gilt-lettered spine. In original unclipped ($22.50) blue dust jacket illustrated by Harry Smith. 194 pages. Inscribed by Ginsberg across title page and facing page, with Ginsberg's line drawing of a frowning Buddha surrounded by stars, moon, and skull. Light edgewear and bumping to boards, a bit of bowing to front board. Jacket with light rubbing, faint sticker residue to front panel. Bright. (Inventory #: 53332)