Acclaimed poet, proprietor who nurtured the Beat Generation
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, an acclaimed poet and longtime proprietor of City Lights, the San Francisco bookstore and avant-garde publishing house that catapulted the Beat Generation to fame and helped establish the city as a center of literary and cultural revolution, died on Monday at his home in San Francisco. He was 101.
The cause was interstitial lung disease, said his son, Lorenzo.
Intensely private and fiercely political, Mr. Ferlinghetti became a household name in the 1950s when he stood trial on obscenity charges for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s hallucinatory anti- establishment manifesto
“Howl.”
The trial brought attention from around the world for Ginsberg, his ecstatically irreverent poem and, by extension, the entire Beat Generation — a roving band of hipsters, poets and artists who rebelled against the country’s conservatism, experimenting with literary forms as well as with drugs, sex and spirituality.
The “Howl” episode also cast Mr. Ferlinghetti as a heroic defender of free speech and a stalwart friend of the creative fringe. In the resulting glare, City Lights became one of San Francisco’s most enduring institutions — at once a source for edgeof-mainstream books, a gathering place for the city’s wandering artists and a pilgrimage site for anarchists, radicals and liberal activists.
When not tending shop, Mr. Ferlinghetti retreated to the attic of an old Victorian house, where he had a typewriter and an expansive view of the city. He wrote dozens of books, including one of the bestselling poetry volumes in American history: “A Coney Island of the Mind” (1958), a plain-spoken, often wry critique of American culture.
Written to be performed aloud with a jazz accompaniment, “Coney Island” helped yank poetry from the academy into the streets.
“Christ climbed down/ from His bare tree/ this year,” reads one poem, “and ran away to where/no intrepid Bible salesmen/covered the territory/in twotone Cadillacs.”
His own writing aside, Mr. Ferlinghetti was more widely known as a fixture at the center of the whirling counterculture that helped shape the nation’s social landscape since the 1950s.
He arrived in California in 1951 as a World War II veteran and a beret-sporting graduate of the Sorbonne. Within two years, he had helped open City Lights, a tiny shop that specialized in selling and publishing paperbacks and little-known poetry.
Located in San Francisco’s Italian-influenced North Beach neighborhood, City Lights quickly became the hangout of choice for the city’s radical intelligentsia, particularly Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso and the rest of the Beats. The doors stayed open until midnight weekdays and 2 a.m. weekends, and even then it was hard to close on time. From its earliest years, it stocked gay and lesbian publications.
“City Lights became about the only place around where you could go in, sit down and read books without being pestered to buy something,” he told The New York Times in 1968. “I had this idea that a bookstore should be a center of intellectual activity, and I knew it was a natural for a publishing company, too.‘‘
Mr. Ferlinghetti inaugurated the publishing arm of City Lights with the paperback Pocket Poet series in 1955. Its first volume was his own “Pictures of the Gone World.”
Over the years, he sought outsiders and underground voices, and his little press gave early exposure to writers who would come to define a generation: Norman Mailer, Denise Levertov and, especially, the freewheeling Beats.