Corso, Gregory Nunzio

▪ 2002

      American poet, playwright, and novelist (b. March 26, 1930, New York, N.Y.—d. Jan. 17, 2001, Robbinsdale, Minn.), was—along with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac—at the centre of the bohemian Beat literary and social movement from its beginning in the mid-1950s and was the last of that movement's original leading members. His poetry, with its unconventional spontaneity, could be candid and inelegant while at the same time inspiring and influential, and his public poetry readings were equally unconventional. Corso had a troubled childhood, living in a succession of orphanages and foster homes and having run-ins with the law, and at age 16 he began a three-year prison term for theft. During his imprisonment he began to read classic poetry and literature voraciously and then to write his own poetry. In 1950 Corso met Ginsberg in a bar in New York City's Greenwich Village, and Ginsberg—seeing promise in Corso's writing—took him into his circle and guided him in writing in a more experimental style. Corso later spent some time in the Boston area. His works were first published in the Harvard Advocate in 1954, and in 1955 his play In This Hung-Up Age was performed by Harvard University students. Students at Harvard and nearby Radcliffe College also financed his first book, The Vestal Lady on Brattle, and Other Poems (1955). The following year, soon after the famous public reading in San Francisco that included Ginsberg's “Howl” and that marked the rise of the Beats, Corso moved there and became recognized as one of the major figures of the movement. Gasoline, his first major book of poems, was published in 1958. Corso also wrote one of his most famous poems, “Bomb,” in 1958; when printed, it was typed in the shape of a mushroom cloud. It was included in the volume of poetry The Happy Birthday of Death (1960). Other notable works included the novel The American Express (1961) and the poetry volumes Long Live Man (1962), The Mutation of the Spirit (1964), Elegiac Feelings American (1970), Earth Egg (1974), Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit (1981), and Mindfield (1989). From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Corso frequently traveled abroad, and he occasionally taught at various colleges. He continued to lecture and give readings through the 1990s.

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