Gregory Corso: A Brief Biography

Gregory Corso (nee Nunzio Corso) was born in Greenwich Village, New York City on March 26, 1930. Abandoned by his Italian parents at a young age, he spent most of his childhood in foster care and on the streets, as well as in adult prisons for petty larceny. After his arrest in 1946, he spent three years in Clinton Correctional Facility wherein he began to write poetry and study classical literature in the prison library.

Upon his release in 1949, Corso worked as a day laborer, while continuing to write poetry. While writing in a New York City bar, he met a young Allen Ginsberg, to whom he showed some of his work. Ginsberg was immediately impressed and later introduced Corso to the other members of what would become the Beat Generation, such as Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. In 1954, Corso moved to Boston where he began auditing classes at Harvard while continuing to write poetry. He worked a variety of jobs during this period and published poems in the Harvard Advocate. His first collection of poems, The Vestal Lady on Brattle and Other Poems, was published in 1955.

In 1956, Corso joined Kerouac and Ginsberg in San Francisco and participated in readings as well as interviews about the Beat Generation. (The previous year, Ginsberg, along with poets Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen, had participated in the famous Six Gallery Reading that had had the effect of announcing the Beat Movement to the world.) In 1957 and 1958, Corso joined the Beats on the trip to Morocco, and then to Paris, wherein he would develop some of his formative works, such as Bomb (a concrete poem whose words were printed in the shape of a mushroom cloud) and Marriage, at the Beat Hotel (a small hotel in which many Beat writers stayed during the late Fifties and early Sixties). Corso enjoyed a considerable amount of fame during this period along with Burroughs, Kerouac, and Ginsberg.

Corso continued to write poetry throughout the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, his corpus comprising multiple collections. He taught for a time at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and at the Naropa Institute in Colorado.

After Ginsberg's death, Corso allowed filmmaker Gustave Reininger to create a documentary about him. While filming Corso - The Last Beat, Corso learned that his mother was alive and had actually given him for adoption in an effort to escape Corso's abusive father. She had tried to find him but had not been successful. In the documentary, Corso and his mother and reunite; shortly thereafter, he finds out he has prostate cancer, of which he would later die. He passed away on January 17, 2001.

Click here to view selected poems by Gregory Corso online.

Sources:

Levi Asher, Gregory Corso, Literary Kicks

Author unknown, Gregory Corso, Poets.org

Michael Skau, Gregory Corso: Biographical Note, Modern American Poets

Biography of (Nunzio) Gregory Corso, Dictionary of Literary Biography

Levi Asher, Six Gallery, Literary Kicks

Jana Jones, Europe: Relais Hotel du Vieux Paris, Sleeping Around with Jana Jones

Archives & Special Collection Staff, Gregory Corso papers, Thomas J. Dodd Center, University of Connecticut

Author Unknown, Synopsis, Corso - the Last Beat