American poet Allen Ginsberg was BOTD in 1926. Born in Newark, New Jersey, he was raised in Paterson, where his father taught English and wrote poetry. His mother Naomi spent much of Allen’s childhood in mental institutions, profoundly affecting his later work. He studied at Columbia University, where he befriended fellow writers Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Lucien Carr, forming the kernel of what would become the Beat Poet movement. Openly gay since his teens, Ginsberg had an intermittent affair with Kerouac over many years, and an unrequited crush on Carr, who was later involved in a sensational trial for the murder of his older lover. After leaving university, he devoted himself to writing, traveling throughout the United States and supporting himself via a series of menial jobs. He made an electrifying literary debut with his 1956 poem Howl, an articulate Whitmanesque lament at the “best minds of my generation” succumbing to the materialism and moral apathy of post-World War Two capitalism. Peppered with expletives and references to homosexuality, drug addiction and Buddhism, the poem was banned in many states and became the subject of a famous obscenity trial. The resulting publicity and the emerging fame of Kerouac and Burroughs (who made fictional portraits of him in their own work) made Ginsberg a literary celebrity. His other major work, Kaddish, a poetic lament for his death mother, was published in 1961. Ginsberg maintained a nomadic existence, travelling throughout the United States and Europe, reading his poetry at campuses and coffee bars, and participating in the anti-war movement. He became a beloved father figure and guru to the countercultural movement of the late 1960s, and his interest in Buddhism and Krishnaism helped popularise Eastern religious practices. More controversially, he was was a supporter and member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association, an organisation that sought to abolish age of consent laws and legalise sexual relations between adults and children. He befriended and mentored many artists and poets, including Bob Dylan, with whom he had a loving but celibate friendship. By the 1970s, he was deified as a major American poet, winning the 1972 National Book Award for poetry for The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965–1971. In later years, he became a prominent activist in campaigns to support people living with HIV/AIDS. He formed a relationship with Peter Orlovsky in 1954, settling in San Francisco and remaining together until his death in 1997, aged 70. In 2014, Ginsberg became an inaugural honoree in San Francisco’s Rainbow Honor Walk. He has been portrayed frequently onscreen, notably by David Cross in Todd Haynes’ 2007 Dylan biopic I’m Not Here, by James Franco in the biopic Howl and Daniel Radcliffe in Kill Your Darlings.