Bob Kaufman, one of fourteen children born in Louisiana to a German Jewish father and a black Catholic mother, ran away to sea when he was thirteen, circling the globe nine times in the next twenty years. In the 1950s, when working as a waiter at the Los Angeles Hilton, he met another erstwhile member of the Merchant Marine, Jack Kerouac, and soon thereafter both moved north to found, along withe Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and others, the San Francisco literary "renaissance" of the time.

Kaufman promotes a spontaneous, prophetic verse, mixing street talk and jazz with vision. Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness contains odes to Charles Mingus, Hart Crane, Ray Charles, and Albert Camus as well as love lyrics, political rants, "Prison Poems," and the prose meditation "Second April."