[citation needed] Sometime in his first year, Corso's mother mysteriously abandoned him, leaving him at the New York child care home, a branch of the Catholic Church Charities.

He told hardened Clinton inmates he and two friends had devised the wild plan of taking over New York City by means of walkie-talkies, projecting a series of improbable and complex robberies.

Communicating by walkie-talkie, each of the three boys took up an assigned position—one inside the store to be robbed, one outside on the street to watch for the police, and a third, Corso, the master-planner, in a small room nearby dictating the orders.

[citation needed] The cell was also equipped with a phone and self-controlled lighting as Luciano was, from prison, cooperating with the U.S. government's wartime effort, providing mafia aid in policing the New York waterfront, and later helping in Naples, Italy through his control of the Camorra.

In 1951, 21-year-old Gregory Corso worked in the garment center by day, and at night was a mascot yet again, this time at one of Greenwich Village's first lesbian bars, the Pony Stable Inn.

Corso joined the Beat circle and was adopted by its co-leaders, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who saw in the young street-wise writer a potential for expressing the poetic insights of a generation wholly separate from those preceding it.

Corso, penniless, lived on a dorm room floor in Elliott house, welcomed by students Peter Sourian, Bobby Sedgwick (brother of Edie), and Paul Grand.

[citation needed] Corso's first published poems appeared in the Harvard Advocate in 1954, and his play In This Hung-up Age—concerning a group of Americans who, after their bus breaks down midway across the continent, are trampled by buffalo—was performed by the esteemed Poets' Theater the following year[6] along with T.S.

Harvard and Radcliffe students, notably Grand, Sourian and Sedgwick, underwrote the printing expenses of Corso's first book, The Vestal Lady on Brattle, and Other Poems.

In a review of The Vestal Lady on Brattle for Poetry, Reuel Denney asked whether "a small group jargon" such as bop language would "sound interesting" to those who were not part of that culture.

Ironically, within a few years, that "small group jargon", the Beat lingo, became a national idiom, featuring words such as "man," "cool," "dig," "chick," "hung up," etc.

Despite Corso's reliance on traditional forms and archaic diction, he remained a street-wise poet, described by Bruce Cook in The Beat Generation as "an urchin Shelley."

Biographer Carolyn Gaiser suggested that Corso adopted "the mask of the sophisticated child whose every display of mad spontaneity and bizarre perception is consciously and effectively designed"—as if he is in some way deceiving his audience.

But the poems at their best are controlled by an authentic, distinctive, and enormously effective voice that can range from sentimental affection and pathos to exuberance and dadaist irreverence toward almost anything except poetry itself.

They were drawn by reports of an iconoclast circle of poets, including Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch.

Corso, already in Europe, joined them in Tangiers and, as a group, they made an ill-fated attempt to take Burroughs' fragmented writings and organize them into a text (which later would become Naked Lunch).

In Paris, Corso introduced Ginsberg and Orlovsky to a Left Bank lodging house above a bar at 9 rue Gît-le-Cœur, that he named the Beat Hotel.

San Francisco's obscenity trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti for publishing Ginsberg's "Howl" had ended in an acquittal, and the national notoriety made "The Beats" famous, adored and ridiculed.

The Beat Generation (so named by Kerouac) was galvanized and young people began dressing with berets, toreador pants, and beards, and carrying bongos.

During the early 1960s, Corso married Sally November, an English teacher who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and attended Shaker High School, and graduated from the University of Michigan.

Sally, who subsequently remarried, resides on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and has kept contact with one of the iconic females associated with the Beat movement, Hettie Jones.

In 1958, Corso had an expanded collection of poems published as number 8 in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series: Gasoline & The Vestal Lady on Brattle.

Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries and she going just so far and I understanding why not getting angry saying You must feel!

Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky— When she introduces me to her parents back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie, should I sit knees together on their 3rd degree sofa and not ask Where's the bathroom?

All her family and her friends and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded just wait to get at the drinks and food—[14] Corso's sometimes surreal word mash-ups in the poem—"forked clarinets," "Flash Gordon soap," "werewolf bathtubs"—caught the attention of many.

[21] Gorski criticizes the Beat movement for tokenism towards women writers and their work, with very few exceptions, including Anne Waldman, and post-beats like Diane DiPrima and herself.

He was a recent adherent, although his credentials were impressive enough to gain him unrestricted admittance ..."[23] It has taken 50 years and the death of the other Beats, for Corso to be fully appreciated as a poet of equal stature and significance.

He never allowed a biographer to work in any "authorized" fashion, and only posthumously was a volume of letters published under the specious artifice[clarification needed] of An Accidental Autobiography.

In the tranquility of this small and lovely cemetery full of trees, flowers and well-fed cats, with the sun's complicity, more than a funeral, it seemed to be a reunion of long-lost friends, with tales, anecdotes, laughter and poetry readings.

[24] He wrote his own epitaph: Spir't is Life It flows thru the death of me endlessly like a river unafraid of becoming the sea In 2017 the international quarterly Four by Two magazine, in collaboration with Raymond Foye, ran a series of previously unpublished poems by Corso, one of them handwritten and accompanied by small paintings, as well as two postcards of his watercolors portraying William Burroughs and Edgar Allan Poe.