Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet, painter and owner of the world-famous literary landmark that is City Lights Bookstore (and publishing house) in San Francisco has died (on February 22, 2021) at the age of 101. The bookstore issued this statement on their website:
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI
March 24, 1919 (Yonkers, New York) – February 22, 2021 (San Francisco, California)
We are sad to announce that Lawrence Ferlinghetti, distinguished American poet, artist, and founder of City Lights Booksellers and Publishers, has died in San Francisco, California. He was 101 years old.
Ferlinghetti was instrumental in democratizing American literature by creating (with Peter D. Martin) the country’s first all-paperback bookstore in 1953, jumpstarting a movement to make diverse and inexpensive quality books widely available. He envisioned the bookstore as a “Literary Meeting Place,” where writers and readers could congregate to shares ideas about poetry, fiction, politics, and the arts. Two years later, in 1955, he launched City Lights Publishers with the objective of stirring an “international dissident ferment.” His inaugural edition was the first volume of the City Lights Pocket Poets Series, which proved to be a seminal force in shaping American poetry.
Ferlinghetti is the author of one of the best-selling poetry books of all time, A Coney Island of the Mind, among many other works. He continued to write and publish new work up until he was 100 years old, and his work has earned him a place in the American canon.
For over sixty years, those of us who have worked with him at City Lights have been inspired by his knowledge and love of literature, his courage in defense of the right to freedom of expression, and his vital role as an American cultural ambassador. His curiosity was unbounded and his enthusiasm was infectious, and we will miss him greatly.
We intend to build on Ferlinghetti’s vision and honor his memory by sustaining City Lights into the future as a center for open intellectual inquiry and commitment to literary culture and progressive politics. Though we mourn his passing, we celebrate his many contributions and give thanks for all the years we were able to work by his side.
While most, when referring to Ferlinghetti, call him a Beat Poet, he preferred to distance himself from that term, seeing his own relationship with the likes of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso as one of circumstance. Although his admiration for the Beats never diminished, his vision was far broader; the books published via City Lights reflected this, international by nature, covering both literature and politics.
He was born in 1919 in New York, his father was an Italian immigrant, and his mother was from a French and Portuguese Sephardic Jewish family. His upbringing was extraordinary by anyone’s standards. His father died before he was born, and his mother was committed to a mental hospital soon after his birth. The task of raising him was passed to his great aunt Emily who took him to live in France before returning to New York in 1924, where she worked for the wealthy Bisland family, educating their children alongside Lawrence. She then just disappeared, leaving him with the Bisland family, who continued to look after him.
He attended the University of North Carolina between 1937 and 1941, where he graduated with a degree in journalism and a broadening view of literature. Like Jack Kerouac, soon after leaving, he enlisted in the Navy, but unlike Jack, he did leave US soil, rising to the rank of Lieutenant-Commander, and his service took him to Britain, where he took part in the D-Day landings and later to Japan after they surrendered. He visited Nagasaki, where the Atom bomb had dropped, and like D-Day, these events left a deep impression.
It was while stationed in New York that he was exposed to the Greenwich Village political scene, including the ideas of pacifism and communism. After leaving the Navy, he rented an apartment in Greenwich and enrolled at Columbia University to do his MA, although he didn’t meet Ginsberg and Kerouac, who also attended. He continued to read, including books by Henry Miller and Yeats and T.S. Eliot, whose Four Quartets was said to have been a major influence upon him.
He had a long-standing interest in both art and literature, something reflected in both his MA relating to John Ruskin and J.M.W. Turner as well as his own poetry and his work (he was also an art critic for Art Digest for a while). Following his MA (1947), he moved to France to study at Sorbonne (where he met his future wife, Selden Kirby-Smith) – his PhD looked at the relationship between poets and the city. It was here that he met George Whitman, who later opened the bookshop Shakespeare & Co – now run by George’s daughter Sylvia.
Ferlinghetti enjoyed the bohemian lifestyle offered by Paris: “I was living out this Hemingway myth in Montparnasse”, which shaped his novel Her, published in 1960. Following its publication in France, French critic Pierre Lepape said, “To all those who have for several years sought to discredit the new American literature, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has just dealt a most powerful blow”, calling it “a masterpiece of the young American novel.” Lepape declared it was “the confirmation of a great American writer who, in the hall of American literary glories, takes the place left vacant by the death of Hemingway.”
Two years earlier, his poetry collection ‘A Coney Island of the Mind’ was published (1958, New Directions), a reading from which featured in our recent poetry and music special: KLOF No. 8. It continues to be one of the most popular poetry books in the U.S., with over 1,000,000 copies in print.
Upon returning to America in 1950, he settled in San Francisco and married Kirby. As well as translating the poetry of French poet Jacques Prevert he worked on his novel Her and taught French classes. He got to know many of the artists and intellectuals of the city, including the poet Kenneth Rexroth who became a kind of mentor – “Rexroth was the great master, and I was just a kid’.
Some of his Prevert translations were accepted by Peter Martin in his magazine called City Lights. Martin was the son of Carlo Tresca, an anarchist whose plan to open a bookshop interested Ferlinghetti. He invested in the venture, and City Lights Pocket Book Shop opened in June 1953. Martin sold his share to Ferlinghetti when he later moved to New York, leaving him to forge ahead with his plans to also, inspired by Parisian bookstores, publish books through City Lights. The first book in the Pocket Poet series ‘Pictures of the Gone World’ was published in August 1955, it featured 27 of his poems, and 500 copies were printed, selling for 75 cents each.
Allen Ginsberg soon arrived in San Francisco and approached Ferlinghetti to publish a collection of poems under the title ‘Empty Mirror’; Ferlinghetti was apparently not impressed with what he saw. Then one day in August 1955, Ginsberg sat and wrote in his journal, “I saw the best mind angel-headed hipster damned”, words that shortly led him to compose his first section of Howl…his most famous poem: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…”. Ferlinghetti’s publication of Howl would change Ginsberg’s life…according to Ginsberg’s biographer Bill Morgan, it pulled Ginsberg ‘out of his doldrums forever.’ The poem led to Ferlinghetti’s arrest, and he was charged for ‘willfully printing and selling lewd and indecent material’. On October 3, 1957, Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene. Prior to the trial and the first publication of Ginsberg’s poem, word had not spread as he had hoped, but the trial would change that, bringing the attention of the media to the new poets of San Franciso, which included an article by Life magazine on the trial…it became a poetry best-seller.
While Ferlinghetti stood against political censorship, I can’t imagine what it must have been like to run a bookshop like City Lights specialising in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics in a country that still bore the scars of McCarthyism. It took guts and a lot of determination. He also believed in the accessibility of art to all: “art should be accessible to all people, not just a handful of highly educated intellectuals”, a belief backed by City Lights, which opens till midnight seven days a week and has a sign that reads “Pick a book, sit down, and read.”
Of course, he was not afraid to share his political views “nationalism itself was the idiotic superstition which would blow up the world” or his concerns for the environment and pollution: “What destroys the poetry of a city? Automobiles destroy it, and they destroy more than the poetry. All over America, all over Europe in fact, cities and towns are under assault by the automobile, are being literally destroyed by car culture. But cities are gradually learning that they don’t have to let it happen to them.”
and humour…Homer, his dog, was named as the publicist for City Lights, after whom he also wrote a poem.
The great work of City Lights continues Ferlinghetti’s legacy…if you’ve yet to dip your toes into the waters of poetry then do so…and share it. Visit City Lights here: http://www.citylights.com/
Recommended: These Are My Rivers: New & Selected Poems, 1955-1993 (1993), A Far Rockaway of the Heart (1997), How to Paint Sunlight (2001), Americus Book I (2004), Poetry as Insurgent Art (2007), Time of Useful Consciousness (2012), and Blasts Cries Laughter (2014), all published by New Directions. His two novels are Her (1960) and Love in the Days of Rage (2001). City Lights issued an anthology of San Francisco poems in 2001.
He is survived by his children and three grandchildren.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: 24 March 1919 – 22 February 2021