Irwin Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 - April 5, 1997), born in Newark NJ, was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, and hostility to bureaucracy. "America" is a poem by Ginsberg written in 1956.