Naphtali Kupferberg was born into a Jewish, Yiddish-speaking household in New York City. A cum laude graduate of Brooklyn College in 1944, Kupferberg founded the magazine Birth in 1958. Kupferberg reportedly appears in Ginsberg's poem Howl as the person "who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer." The incident in question actually occurred on the Manhattan Bridge. Ginsberg's description in Howl uses poetic license. Kupferberg did jump from the Manhattan Bridge in 1944, after which he was picked up by a passing tugboat and taken to Gouverneur Hospital. Severely injured, he had broken the transverse process of his spine and spent time in a body cast. In 1964, Kupferberg formed the satirical rock groupthe Fugs with poet Ed Sanders. Kupferberg was active in New York pacifist-anarchist circles. In 1965 he was one of the lecturers at the newly founded Free University of New York. He appeared as a machine-gun-toting soldier policing Manhattan in , a 1971 film about the revolutionary psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich by Dušan Makavejev. An anti-police-brutality skit from his Revolting Theatre appeared in the 1971 Richard Pryorunderground filmDynamite Chicken. In 1972, Kupferberg played the role of God in the Canadian experimental filmVoulez-vous coucher avec God?. Kupferberg later appeared in the music video for Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror by Jeffrey Lewis. Kupferberg suffered a stroke in April 2009 at his home in New York City, which left him severely visually impaired and in need of regular nursing care. After treatment for a number of days at a New York hospital, followed by convalescence at a nursing home, he recuperated at home. Kupferberg died in New York Downtown Hospital in Manhattan of kidney failure and sepsis on July 12, 2010. In 2008, in one of his last interviews, he told Mojo Magazine, "Nobody who lived through the '50s thought the '60s could've existed. So there's always hope."
