Gregory Corso, Poetus Magnus in his alchemic Attic room 9 Rue Gît-Le-Coeur, dormer window half-block from the Seine; Holbein-Rembrandt postcard faces & Notre Dame stained glass window cards pinned to wall, little winged plaster angel hanging right. Gregory half-smiling magician work-mixer with cloak & staff was writing Happy Birthday of Death’s “Bomb, “Army,” “Hair” & “Death,“ Peter and I lived in front room downstairs, Burroughs on floor below, Paris 1957. • (photo & caption: Allen Ginsberg, courtesy Stanford University Libraries / Allen Ginsberg Estate / Getty Images)

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“Virtually all the Beats as well as their precursors were separated from their parents or experienced challenging years growing up: Henry Miller suffered under the control of an unloving and abusive mother; William Saroyan at age three lost his father and was placed in the Fred Finch orphanage in Oakland; Ferlinghetti and Robert Duncan were raised by adoptive parents; di Prima suffered beatings and sexual abuse; Gregory Corso was abandoned at age one and placed in a foster home; Kerouac was deeply wounded by the death of his brother Gerard; Burroughs underwent some primal (most likely sexual) trauma; the mothers of both Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder had histories of mental illness. These ruptures and consequent possible psychological dissociation made the Beats’ liminal relationship to stable identity a complex one and thus also may have rendered them more open to mystical experiences in which the sense of separating boundaries between self and world is made fluid.”

— David Stephen Calonne, The Spiritual Imagination of the Beats