`The guy tending the store'
Poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco became a West Coast literary haven for Beat Generation writers including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, has died at the age of 101, City Lights said Tuesday.
Ferlinghetti, who played a key role in a free-speech battle after he published Ginsberg's poem Howl in 1956, died Monday evening, City Lights Books said on Twitter, adding “We love you, Lawrence.”
When Ferlinghetti turned 100 on March 24, 2019, San Francisco officials declared it Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day. City Lights threw a party, although the honoree did not attend. The Beat Generation first percolated in New York in the 1950s but Kerouac, Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and a slew of other writers, artists, hipsters, activists and thrill-seekers would eventually wander west to 261 Columbus Ave. in San Francisco's North Beach neighbourhood to hang out at City Lights.
“I keep telling people I wasn't a member of the original Beat Generation,”
Ferlinghetti told The Los Angeles Times in 2005. “I was sort of the guy tending the store.”
In 1957, Ferlinghetti found himself on the front line of a constitutional fight when he was arrested after publishing and selling Ginsberg's groundbreaking Howl and Other Poems. While Beat peers considered it an epic achievement, Howl shocked many with its references to drugs and homosexuality and renunciation of mainstream society. A judge cleared Ferlinghetti, ruling Howl was not obscene because it had redeeming social value.
Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin, a sociology student at the time, had founded City Lights as a bookstore and small publisher in 1953, naming it for Charlie Chaplin's 1931 movie. In a few years it became a gathering spot for intellectuals, writers, dissidents, activists, musicians and artists.
“City Lights became about the only place around where you could go in, sit down and read books without being pestered to buy something,” Ferlinghetti told The Hartford Courant in 2006. “Also, I had this idea that a bookstore should be a centre of intellectual activity.”
Ferlinghetti's works often showed an anti-establishment or political bent. He wanted his poems to be accessible to all.
The most successful of his many works was the 1958 poetry collection A Coney Island of the Mind, which sold more than a million copies.
Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, N.Y. He earned a journalism degree at the University of North Carolina, served in the U.S. Navy during the Second World War, serving on a submarine-chasing ship during the D-day invasion, and received a doctorate in literature from the Sorbonne. During his navy service, Ferlinghetti toured Nagasaki six weeks after it was hit with a U.S. atomic bomb. He told The San Francisco Chronicle that in the rubble he found a teacup with what appeared to be human flesh melted on it. “In that instant, I became a total pacifist,” he said.
When asked how he remained prolific and lived to 100, he told NPR: “Have a good laugh and you'll live longer.”