An American counterculture author, musician, and cartoonist, he became famous for 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft, published in 1967. He is also known as the co-founder of The Fugs, a 1960s New York band.
He was born into a New York Jewish family and graduated from Brooklyn College in 1944.
He identified as a pacifist anarchist during the Vietnam War era.
He was married to Sylvia Topp. He was heavily involved in New York literary circles that included such Beat poets as Allen Ginsberg and Ed Sanders.
His rock band, The Fugs, was named after the word that author Norman Mailer substituted for a harsher obscenity in his novel The Naked and the Dead.