Allen Ginsberg and the Beats in Literary Paris, or Apollinaire through the Door of Ginsberg’s Mind

In 1957, fresh off the success of “Howl,” Allen Ginsberg arrived in Paris, where he and his fellow Beats Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, and then William Burroughs would settle into a rundown boarding house soon dubbed the Beat Hotel. During their time in Paris, from 1957–1963, though Ginsberg stayed just nine months and their presence tapered off after 1960, the Beats managed to convert their dilapidated quarters into the next in a long line of Paris communities of creative and bohemian activity. The move to Paris placed the Beats in the heart of the same Latin Quarter where earlier American writers such as Stein, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald cemented their literary reputations as did an even larger number of French and European artists and writers who owed much of their notoriety to the city itself.