BusinessWorld
March 3, 2021 | 12:02 am
LAWRENCE Ferlinghetti, the poet and bookstore owner whose publication of Allen Ginsbergâs poem
Howl in 1956 led to a landmark obscenity trial that spotlighted the Beat literary movement, died at the age of 101.
He died on Feb. 22 at his home in San Francisco, according to
The Washington Post, citing his son Lorenzo. The cause was lung disease.
Mr. Ferlinghettiâs City Lights became the nationâs first all-paperback bookstore when it opened in San Franciscoâs North Beach section in 1953. Since then, it has served as a gathering place for writers, artists and bohemians, from Jack Kerouac and the Beats to hippies, punk rockers and iPhone-carrying hipsters.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet and bookstore owner whose publication of Allen Ginsberg’s poem
Howl in 1956 led to a landmark obscenity trial that spotlighted the Beat literary movement, has died. He was 101.
He died on Feb 22 at his home in San Francisco, according to the
Washington Post, citing his son Lorenzo. The cause was lung disease.
Ferlinghetti’s City Lights became the nation’s first all-paperback bookstore when it opened in San Francisco’s North Beach section in 1953. Since then, it has served as a gathering place for writers, artists and bohemians, from Jack Kerouac and the Beats to hippies, punk rockers and iPhone-carrying hipsters.
San Francisco’s informal poet laureate, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, died this week at the age of 101. Yes, 101. He had been around so long that he while he had been a kind of spiritual leader for the “Beat poets” of the 1950s and ’60s, he often preferred to describe himself as one of the last of the bohemians from an earlier age, rather than one of those Beat poets he had done so much to support. Perhaps he saw himself sipping absinthe in the Les Deux Magots in Paris with his fellow bohemian writers and artists, with other US expatriate writers looking on from a nearby table, and maybe EE Cummings, or even Walt Whitman watching with interest.
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”.
D-Day Veteran Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poet and Founder of City Lights, Dead at 101
FILE - In this Nov. 16, 2005 file photo, author Lawrence Ferlinghetti reads a poem after he was awarded the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community at the National Book Awards in New York. Ferlinghetti, one of the last links to the early days of the Beat poetry movement, never doubted the artistry of Bob Dylan or his worthiness of the Nobel prize. Ferlinghetti said that decades ago he had hoped the singer-songwriter would release his material in print form. (AP Photo/Henny Ray Abrams, File)