Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born on March 24, 1919 in Yonkers, New York. He recieved a doctoral degree in poetry at the Sorbonne in Paris with "The City as Symbol in Modern Poetry: In Search of a Metropolitan Tradition." He soon moved to San Francisco and started a magazine called City Lights with Peter Martin. The magazine was named after a Charlie Chaplin movie. They had offices in a building in North Beach. They decided to open a bookstore there, naming it after the magazine. Ferlinghetti began publishing orginal books by himself and other poets under the City Lights name, including the "Pocket Poets" series. The fourth Pocket Poets book was Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," and Ferlinghetti was tried on obscenity charges for this. He was declared innocent, a landmark victory for free speech.
Ferlinghetti owned a cabin in Big Sur in the 60s that became the focal point of Jack Kerouac's 1962 novel Big Sur. Ferlinghetti appears in the book as Lorenzo Monsanto, who urges the narrator (based on Kerouac) to go on a nature retreat to stop drinking, with terrible results.
Ferlinghetti is still active today as a poet and as the proprietor of City Lights.
Ferlinghetti's bibliography
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