SOURCE: Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. “Horn on ‘Howl.’” Evergreen Review 1, no. 4 (winter 1957): 145-58.

In the following essay, Ferlinghetti gives an account of the charges that were levied against him for publishing and selling obscene writings and his subsequent San Francisco trial, after he published the first U.S. edition of Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems.

Fahrenheit 451, the temperature at which books burn, has finally been determined not to be the prevailing temperature at San Francisco, though the police still would be all too happy to make it hot for you. On October 3 last, Judge Clayton Horn of Municipal Court brought in a 39-page opinion finding Shigeyoshi Murao and myself not guilty of publishing or selling obscene writings, to wit Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems and issue 11 & 12 of The Miscellaneous Man.

Thus ended one of the most irresponsible and callous police actions to be perpetrated west of the Rockies, not...