Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet and bookstore owner whose publication of Allen Ginsberg’s poem
Howl in 1956 led to a landmark obscenity trial that spotlighted the Beat literary movement, has died. He was 101.
He died on Feb 22 at his home in San Francisco, according to the
Washington Post, citing his son Lorenzo. The cause was lung disease.
Ferlinghetti’s City Lights became the nation’s first all-paperback bookstore when it opened in San Francisco’s North Beach section in 1953. Since then, it has served as a gathering place for writers, artists and bohemians, from Jack Kerouac and the Beats to hippies, punk rockers and iPhone-carrying hipsters.
San Francisco’s informal poet laureate, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, died this week at the age of 101. Yes, 101. He had been around so long that he while he had been a kind of spiritual leader for the “Beat poets” of the 1950s and ’60s, he often preferred to describe himself as one of the last of the bohemians from an earlier age, rather than one of those Beat poets he had done so much to support. Perhaps he saw himself sipping absinthe in the Les Deux Magots in Paris with his fellow bohemian writers and artists, with other US expatriate writers looking on from a nearby table, and maybe EE Cummings, or even Walt Whitman watching with interest.
By John Maher | Feb 23, 2021
“If you would be a poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a man who would know, wrote in 2007, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if it means sounding apocalyptic..”
For nearly the better part of seven decades, Ferlinghetti not only wrote such poems but sold them, from San Francisco s City Lights Booksellers, which he founded with Peter D. Martin in 1953, and published them, at City Lights Publishers, which he started in 1955. Martin left the business that year, but Ferlinghetti remained, mentoring generations of people of letters of all sorts along the way.
Still, even the greatest verses end: Ferlinghetti died on February 22 at his home in the Golden City, his bookstore confirmed; his daughter, Julie Sasser, told the
San Francisco literary lion Lawrence Ferlinghetti died Monday at 101.
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A prolific poet with more than 30 collections published over a half-century, Ferlinghetti was known for the central role he played in San Francisco’s literary universe, where he arrived in 1951 in search of bohemia. (Quite literally. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that, soon after arriving, he “asked a stranger to point him in the direction of the bohemian quarter in the city” and then moved in.)
Ferlinghetti and a partner launched City Lights as the country’s first all-paperback bookstore in 1953, as the city’s Beat renaissance unfolded in the city. The bookshop is still going strong in North Beach nearly seven decades later, though it was closed for the first part of the day on Tuesday in his memory.
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