Irwin Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American Beat poet born in Newark, New Jersey. Ginsberg is best known for Howl (1956), a long poem about consumer society's negative human values and the self-destruction of his friends among the beat generation. Ginsberg's poetry was strongly influenced by modernism, romanticism, the beat and cadence of jazz, early English prose-poetry, his Kagyu Buddhist practice and his Jewish background.