The poet who became a counterculture icon

Lawrence Ferlinghetti 1919–2021

Lawrence Ferlinghetti believed in poetry as a force for social change. As an author, publisher, and the proprietor for seven decades of San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore—a mecca for literary bohemians and political progressives—Ferlinghetti nurtured and inspired generations of writers and artists. He was something of a godfather to the Beats, championing and publishing Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg. He earned national notoriety when he was prosecuted for obscenity in 1957 for publishing Ginsberg’s explicit counterculture manifesto “Howl”—and acquitted due to the poem’s “redeeming social significance.” More conservative in his personal life than the dissolute Beats, Ferlinghetti wrote dozens of volumes of poetry marked by simple language, wry humor, and populist politics; his 1958 collection A Coney Island of the Mind sold more than a million copies and was translated into numerous languages. Poetry is “an insurgent art,” he said, that can “save the world by transforming consciousness.” Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, N.Y., the youngest of five sons, said The Washington

Post. His Italian father died six months before

Ferlinghetti’s birth. His mother, “disabled by grief, was institutionalized when he was a toddler.” Ferlinghetti was raised by relatives in France and New York City before being taken in by a wealthy couple for whom his aunt worked as a governess. He earned a journalism degree at the University of North Carolina, then served as a naval officer in World War II, an experience that turned him into “a pacifist and political activist,” said the Los Angeles Times. After the war he earned a master’s degree at Columbia University and a comparative literature doctorate at the Sorbonne before settling in San Francisco. He tried to make a living as a painter before opening City Lights with a partner in 1953, each making a $500 investment. In the decades that followed, Ferlinghetti published poetry and fiction, “wrote essays and political polemic,” and kept “honing his poetic techniques,” said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). He never stopped writing, releasing the memoirish experimental novel Little Boy in 2019, at the age of 99. And “all the while he minded the store.” In a 2018 interview, Ferlinghetti said of City Lights, “I’m there in spirit all the time.”

But how often, he was asked, in reality? “As a poet,” he replied, “I don’t deal in reality.”