Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti stands among the central poets who emerged from the Beat Generation, alongside a small circle of peers that includes Allen Ginsberg. He established the landmark City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, an enterprise that quickly expanded into a publishing imprint. Through that imprint he issued Ginsberg’s controversial poem “Howl” as part of a line of compact poetry volumes, an act that led to a widely covered obscenity trial. The case ended in acquittal for the poets and was viewed as a decisive win for free expression. Born in Yonkers, NY, on March 24, 1919, Ferlinghetti was sent to France to live with a relative after his mother was institutionalized; he came back to the United States at age five. While attending boarding school in the late 1920s he began composing verse. An arrest for petty theft brought him a volume of Baudelaire’s poetry, an encounter that cemented his commitment to the art and turned him from further trouble.

After encountering Peter Martin, publisher of the magazine City Lights, the pair launched a bookstore of the same name that soon served as a gathering place for the era’s writers and artists. With his direct, unadorned style, Ferlinghetti became a defining presence in Beat literature and a fixture of its mythology. His cabin in Big Sur supplied the central setting for Jack Kerouac’s 1962 novel Big Sur, in which Ferlinghetti appears as Lorenzo Monsanto urging a celebrated, hard-drinking writer modeled on Kerouac to abandon alcohol and return to the natural world. He has continued to work as a prolific poet, political activist, and owner of City Lights. In 1997 Rykodisc issued a spoken-word recording of his thirty-poem sequence Coney Island of the Mind, with accompaniment from members of the band Morphine.