I like "Howl" a lot.  Who wouldn't?  It just doesn't have much to do
with me or what happened to my friends.  For one thing, I believe that
the best minds of my generation were probably musicians and physicists
and mathematicians and biologists and archaeologists and chess masters
and so on, and Ginsberg's closest friends, if I'm not mistaken, were
undergraduates in the English department of Columbia University.

No offense intended, but it would never occur to me to look for the
best minds in any generation in an undergraduate English department
anywhere.  I would certainly try the physics department or the music
department first -- and after that biochemistry.  Everybody knows that
the dumbest people in any American university are in the education
department, and English after that.

		-- Kurt Vonnegut