This is an insider's history of the "Beat" movement and its personalities through the personal photographs of one of its principal figures: Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997). Pointing his camera randomly at the counterculture around him, the poet created a unique visual record of his friends and companions covering a period of almost 40 years. His subjects include Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Robert Frank, Paul Bowles, Timothy Leary and dozens of other writers, painters and friends as well as several revealing self-portraits. Beneath each photograph are Ginsberg's handwritten reminiscences of the circumstances, people and places relating to the photograph.