Died: February 22, 2021. LAWRENCE Ferlinghetti, who has died aged 101, was an American literary revolutionary who opened out the world of books to all. As a poet, his work possessed a pared-back directness and Zen simplicity. He wrote for the tongue as much as the page, and delivered his words in energetic sing-song tones that paved the way for spoken-word scenes to come. His 1958 collection, A Coney Island of the Mind, sold more than a million copies. He once said that “art should be accessible to all people, not just a handful of highly-educated intellectuals”. As a bookseller, his shop, City Lights, adopted a similarly egalitarian, open-all-hours approach that made it the nexus of San Francisco’s underground Beat scene in search of late-night literary fixes.
Coronavirus-Liveticker: +++ 23:26 Polen: Jeder Dritte will sich nicht impfen lassen +++
n-tv.de - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from n-tv.de Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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.”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and titan of the Beat era, dies at 101 Elaine Woo © (Stacey Lewis / Stacey Lewis) Lawrence Ferlinghetti outside City Lights Bookstore in 2013. (Stacey Lewis)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti was the opposite of the flamboyant literary bad boys drawn to the bohemian haven he nurtured in 1950s San Francisco.
Unlike Beat novelist Jack Kerouac and poet Allen Ginsberg, he was known for neither public drunkenness nor public nudity. Tall and lean, he swam daily and biked to work at City Lights, the San Francisco bookshop that became a landmark of intellectual freedom not long after he co-founded it seven decades ago.
The Globe and Mail Jesse McKinley Published February 23, 2021
STRINGER/Reuters
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a poet, publisher and political iconoclast who inspired and nurtured generations of San Francisco artists and writers from City Lights, his famed bookstore, died Monday at his home in San Francisco. He was 101.
The cause was interstitial lung disease, his daughter, Julie Sasser, said.
The spiritual godfather of the Beat movement, Mr. Ferlinghetti made his home base in the modest independent book haven now formally known as City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. A self-described “literary meeting place” founded in 1953 and located on the border of the city’s sometimes swank, sometimes seedy North Beach neighbourhood, City Lights, on Columbus Avenue, soon became as much a part of the San Francisco scene as the Golden Gate Bridge or Fisherman’s Wharf. (The city’s board of supervisors designated it a historic landmark in 2001.)
vimarsana © 2020. All Rights Reserved.