Sam Whiting and Nora Mishanec February 23, 2021Updated: February 25, 2021, 10:24 pm
Lawrence Ferlinghetti at his apartment in North Beach in March 2018. Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle 2018
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the first poet laureate of San Francisco, was so beloved that on Tuesday, Feb. 23, a day after his death at age 101, Supervisor Aaron Peskin closed the regular meeting of the Board of Supervisors with a four-minute memorial sermon that went uninterrupted.
Peskin touched on the great poet’s internal contradictions as both a Navy man and a pacifist, and his abiding belief that the funkiness of North Beach must be protected, which Ferlinghetti himself did by cranking his red jalopy truck up and down the steep hills and along Columbus Avenue. By the end of his speech, Peskin was visibly emotional.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet who founded City Lights bookshop, epicentre of the Beat movement – obituary
He published Kerouac and Ginsberg and helped to establish San Francisco as a hub of Fifties and Sixties counterculture
Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1998
Credit: REUTERS
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who has died aged 101, was a poet who, as founder of the celebrated City Lights bookstore and publishing house in San Francisco, was a key player in the Beat movement. He was immortalised in Jack Kerouac’s novel Big Sur.
City Lights, the first all-paperback bookshop in the US, was established in 1953 as a forum for political dissidence and poetic debate. It exploded into the national consciousness when Ferlinghetti was arrested and charged under the Obscenity Act for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s talismanic poem of gay sex, artistic consciousness and spirituality, “Howl”.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and founder of City Lights, dead at 101
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Bookstore, which he co-founded, with Peter D. Martin, in 1953.John O’Hara / The Chronicle 2001Show MoreShow Less
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti at Caffe Trieste in North Beach in 2006.Deanne Fitzmaurice / The ChronicleShow MoreShow Less
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s copy of T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” his most treasured book, was given to him by the mother of his girlfriend in Greenwich Village in 1943.Courtesy Lawrence Ferlinghetti 2017Show MoreShow Less
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti with copies of “Howl and Other Poems” in 1957.Bob Campbell / The ChronicleShow MoreShow Less