Peter Orlovsky was born on July 8th, 1933 on the Lower East side in New York City. As a teen, Orlovsky watched his parents separate and have problems with alcoholism. At the age of seventeen, Orlovsky quit high school and began looking for a way to support himself; He became an orderly at the Creedmore State Mental Hospital in New York. In 1953, he was drafted for the Korean War. Because of his 'erratic' behavior, he was sent to San Francisco to be a medic. Upon his discharge from the military, Orlovsky moved in with painter Robert LaVigne, where he served as a model and a companion to LaVigne. A year late, LaVigne introduced Orlovsky to his friend, Allen Ginsberg. Soon after, Orlovsky and Ginsberg became lovers and noted that their relationship was a 'marriage.' In 1957, Orlovsky began to make several attempts at writing while he and Ginsberg were spending some time in Paris. Meeting the likes of Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Gregory Corso, Orlovsky began to travel all over the world (with or without Ginsberg) to many places like: Northern Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and India. In 1974, Orlovksy became a professor at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The name of the course he taught?: Poetry for Dumb Students. He and Ginsberg continued living together (with periods of separation here and there) in an apartment in the Lower East Side of New York City until Ginsberg's death in 1997.
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