Bedrock of the Beat Generation dies at 101
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the last great poet of the Beat Generation who helped to establish the counterculture movement of 1950s America through his City Lights bookshop and publishers, has died, the store said on Tuesday. He was 101.
“We love you, Lawrence,” City Lights said on Twitter, adding that Ferlinghetti died on Monday. Born on March 24, 1919, the New York native took part in the D-day landings of World War II and saw the horror of atomic-bombed Nagasaki before ending up in San Francisco and co-founding City Lights in 1953.
The bookstore became the outlet of Beat expression, a meeting point for its freewheeling poets and, two years later, the first publisher of its leading authors, including Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, William S Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.
Ferlinghetti released his own volume, A Coney Island of the Mind, in 1958, the collection selling more than a million copies and establishing him as a major poet in his own right.
The year before, he was arrested on obscenity charges for publishing Ginsberg’s Howl, considered an anthem of the disaffected Beat generation with its opening line, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.”
The poem, which refers to homosexuality and drugs, was criticised as explicit, but Ferlinghetti was acquitted in a highly publicised trial at which the judge ruled Ginsberg’s work was “not... without redeeming social importance”.
Ferlinghetti’s bookshop also among the first to carry gay, lesbian and transgender publications - has endured as a literary landmark and even a tourist destination.