In December 1953 Ginsberg left New York City on a trip to Mexico to explore Indian ruins in Yucatan and experiment with various drugs.He settled in San Francisco, where he fell in love with a young artist''s model, Peter Orlovsky.He took a job in market research, thinking that he might enroll in the graduate English program at the University of California in Berkeley.In August 1955, inspired by the manuscript of a long jazz poem titled "Mexico City Blues" that Kerouac had recently written in Mexico City, Ginsberg found the courage to begin to type what he called his most personal "imaginative sympathies" in the long poem "Howl for Carl Solomon".
In October 1955 Ginsberg read the first part of his new poem in public for the first time to tumultuous applause at the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco with the local poets Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, and Philip LaMantia.Journalists were quick to herald the reading as a landmark event in American poetry, the birth of what they labeled the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance.
Early in 1956, Howl and Other Poems was published with an introduction by William Carlos Williams as number four in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series and was subject to a famous obscenity trial due to its frank treatment of his homosexuality and explicit content.The case became a cause celebre for defenders of freedom of speech, the judgment finally overturned by Judge Clayton Horn on the grounds of the book''s "redeeming social importance".