Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet who founded City Lights bookshop, epicentre of the Beat movement – obituary
He published Kerouac and Ginsberg and helped to establish San Francisco as a hub of Fifties and Sixties counterculture
Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1998
Credit: REUTERS
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who has died aged 101, was a poet who, as founder of the celebrated City Lights bookstore and publishing house in San Francisco, was a key player in the Beat movement. He was immortalised in Jack Kerouac’s novel Big Sur.
City Lights, the first all-paperback bookshop in the US, was established in 1953 as a forum for political dissidence and poetic debate. It exploded into the national consciousness when Ferlinghetti was arrested and charged under the Obscenity Act for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s talismanic poem of gay sex, artistic consciousness and spirituality, “Howl”.
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