News at Eleven: [Allen] Ginsberg's friendship with poet

William Carlos Williams illuminates his blind ambition to be read. "Williams is nutty as a fruitcake," he wrote in 1952. "It also means we can all get books out." Their willingness to use people is not surprising-but the consistency of their self-assuredness is. In the earliest letters, barely out of their teens, Ginsberg and [Jack] Kerouac had already found their voices, and they knew it, too. "We creative geniuses must bite fingernails together or at least we should," Kerouac wrote to Ginsberg. They criticize each other's writing-not just poems and stories, but the language of the letters themselves-with a severity that makes their harshest critics seem kind.

from The New York Observer: They Bared Their Brains to Heaven: Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg

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