Lawrence Ferlinghetti

San Francisco's first poet laureate, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
in front of his City Lights Bookstore
SF Chronicle photo by John O'Hara
(http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1998/08/12/MN76094.DTL)
no copyright infringement intended

Founded in 1953 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin, City Lights is a place where book lovers from across the country and around the world come to browse, read, and just soak in the ambiance of alternative culture's Territorio Libre.

(http://www.citylights.com/)

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York in 1919. Shortly after his birth, he was sent to France to be raised by a female relative. It wasn't until his return to America, at the age of five, that this future poet learned to speak English. Ferlinghetti also began writing poetry during his years at boarding school in the late 1920's.
During his adolescence, Lawrence joined a street gang known as the Parkway Road Pirates, which led to an arrest for petty theft. Soon after, a woman by the name of Sally Bisland handed the troubled young man a copy of Baudelaire poems and inspired within him a love for literature.
After his graduation from high school, Ferlinghetti attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he enjoyed works by Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos and Wolfe. He even began writing a novel inspired by Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel.
Many of his early years were spent living the life of the Beat. On one occasion, Ferlinghetti and a couple of friends hitchhiked and hopped freight trains to Mexico while reading many of the popular poets of the period.
Ferlinghetti then joined the Navy where he became a Lieutenant Commander. Six weeks after the dropping of the atomic bomb, Ferlinghetti was discharged and spent some time in Portland. The G.I. Bill, along with his interest in writers, had him furthering his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris.
In 1952, Ferlinghetti became acquainted with Kenneth Rexroth. Rexroth had already established himself as a notable West Coast writer, artist and political activist. After meeting Peter Martin, the publisher of City Lights magazine, the two planned to open a bookshop by the same name.
The City Lights bookstore of San Francisco soon became a mecca for writers and artists, many of them well established in the field of contemporary literature. The movement was catapulted by readings from writers such as Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder and became known as the Beat period.
Perhaps one of the most volatile and creative times in post-modern literature, the Beat sub-culture today is looked back upon as a very glorious period. Ferlinghetti remains one of the most notable writers from those times and his writings are still widely read and appreciated today.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_Generation)

• Baseball Canto
• A Vast Confusion
• Constantly Risking Absurdity
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti turns 100

(A Life in Books)