Carl Solomon

Carl Solomon
Solomon at the Gotham Book Mart celebrating the reissue of Junkie, NYC, 1977
Born	(1928-03-30)March 30, 1928 Bronx, New York City
Died	February 26, 1993(1993-02-26) (aged 64) Bronx, New York City

Carl Solomon (March 30, 1928 – February 26, 1993) was an American writer. One of Solomon's best-known pieces of writing is Report from the Asylum: Afterthoughts of a Shock Patient.

Solomon was born in the Bronx of New York City. His father's death in 1939 had a profoundly negative effect on his early life. Solomon later said of the time, "I drifted into indiscipline and intellectual adventure that eventually became complete confusion." Graduating from high school at fifteen, Solomon then went to The City College of New York (CCNY) for a short time before joining the United States Maritime Service in 1944. In his travels overseas, Solomon became exposed to Surrealism and Dada, ideas that would inspire him throughout his life. In Paris, he witnessed Antonin Artaud give a screaming poetry reading—this so impressed him that he would remain a disciple of Artaud for much of his life. It was shortly after this period that Carl Solomon was voluntarily institutionalized, a gesture he made as a Dadaist symbol of defeat.

It was in the waiting room of Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey that he met Allen Ginsberg, who was there after being admitted in 1949, after Ginsberg was arrested for having stolen goods in his apartment and the vehicle he was in. It was through Ginsberg that Solomon would gain his fame. Ginsberg later dedicated his poem Howl to Solomon. It uses the phrase "I'm with you in Rockland" as a refrain to each line in the third section. The first section of the poem immortalizes a few of Solomon's personal exploits, such as the line, "...who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy."

It was at Ginsberg's insistence that William S. Burroughs' first novel, Junkie, was published by Ace Books. Solomon's uncle, A. A. Wyn, was the owner of Ace Books, a purveyor of pulp fiction and non-fiction paperbacks. Solomon worked for Ace and was responsible for the Publisher's Note from the first printing of Junkie, as well as the Introduction to the 1964 reprinting.