Lawrence Ferlinghetti, literary citadel of San Francisco, dies at age 101 Published February 23 Share on Facebook Print article Lawrence Ferlinghetti, an acclaimed poet and longtime proprietor of City Lights, the San Francisco bookstore and avant-garde publishing house that catapulted the Beat Generation to fame and helped establish the city as a center of literary and cultural revolution, died Feb. 22 at his home in San Francisco. He was 101. The cause was interstitial lung disease, said his son, Lorenzo. Intensely private and fiercely political, Ferlinghetti became a household name in the 1950s when he stood trial on obscenity charges for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s hallucinatory anti-establishment manifesto “Howl.”