Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Encyclopedia
Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an American
poet
, painter
, liberal activist
, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers
. Author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, he is best known for A Coney Island of the Mind
(New York: New Directions
, 1958), a collection of poems that has been translated into nine languages, with sales of over 1 million copies.
on March 24, 1919. His mother, née Lyons Albertine Mendes-Monsanto was of French
, Portuguese
Sephardic Jewish heritage. His father, Carlo Ferlinghetti, was born in Brescia
, Italy
in 1872. He immigrated to the United States in 1892, and worked as an auctioneer in Little Italy, NYC. At some unknown point, Carlo Ferlinghetti shortened the family name to "Ferling," and Lawrence wouldn't learn of his original name until 1942, when he had to provide a birth certificate to join the US Navy. Though he used "Ferling" for his earliest published work, Ferlinghetti reverted to the original Italian "Ferlinghetti" in 1955, when publishing his first book of poems, Pictures of the Gone World.
Ferlinghetti's father died six months before he was born, and his mother was committed to an asylum shortly after his birth. He was raised by his French aunt Emily, former wife of Ludovico Monsanto, an uncle of his mother from the Virgin Islands who taught Spanish at the U.S. Naval Academy. Emily took Ferlinghetti to Strasbourg
, France
, where they lived during his first five years, with French as his first language.
After their return to the U.S., Ferlinghetti was placed in an orphanage in Chappaqua, N.Y. while Emily looked for employment. She was eventually hired as a French governess for the daughter of Presley Eugene Bisland and his wife Anna Lawrence Bisland, in Bronxville, New York
, the latter being the daughter of the founder of Sarah Lawrence College
, William Van Duzer Lawrence
. They resided at the Plashbourne Estate
. In 1926, Ferlinghetti was left in the care of the Bislands. After attending various schools, including Riverdale Country School, Bronxville Public School, and Mount Hermon School (now Northfield Mount Hermon School), he went to the University of North Carolina
in Chapel Hill, where he earned a B.A. in journalism in 1941. Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an Eagle Scout
in the Boy Scouts of America
. His sports journalism was published in The Daily Tar Heel
, and he published his first short stories in Carolina Magazine, for which Thomas Wolfe
had written.
, Ferlinghetti enrolled in Midshipmen’s school in Chicago, and in 1942 shipped out as junior officer on J. P. Morgan III
's yacht, which had been refitted to patrol for submarines off the East Coast.
Ferlinghetti was next assigned to the Ambrose Lightship outside New York harbor, to identify all incoming ships. In 1943 and 1944 he served as an officer on three U.S. Navy subchasers used as convoy escorts. As commander of the subchaser USS SC1308, he was at the Normandy
invasion as part of the anti-submarine screen around the beaches. After VE Day, the Navy transferred him to the Pacific Theater, where he served as navigator of the troop ship USS Selinur
. Six weeks after the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki, he visited the ruins of the city, an experience that turned him into a life-long pacifist.
. The G.I. Bill then enabled him to enroll in the Columbia University
graduate school. Among his professors there were Babette Deutsch
, Lionel Trilling
, Jacques Barzun
, and Mark Van Doren
. In those years he was reading modern literature, and has said he was at that time influenced particularly by Shakespeare, Marlowe
, the Romantic poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins
, and James Joyce
, as well as American poets Whitman
, T. S. Eliot
, Ezra Pound
, Carl Sandburg
, Vachel Lindsay
, Marianne Moore
, E. E. Cummings
, and American novelists Thomas Wolfe
, Ernest Hemingway
, and John Dos Passos
. He earned a master’s degree in English literature in 1947 with a thesis on John Ruskin
and the British painter J. M. W. Turner
. From Columbia, he went to Paris
to continue his studies, and lived in the city between 1947 and 1951, earning a Doctorat de l’Université de Paris, with a “mention très honorable.” His two theses were on the city as a symbol in modern poetry and on the nature of Gothic.
, he settled in San Francisco in 1953, where he taught French in an adult education program, painted, and wrote art criticism. His first translations, of poems by the French surrealist Jacques Prévert
, were published by Peter D. Martin in his popular culture magazine City Lights.
In 1953, Ferlinghetti and Martin founded City Lights Bookstore
, the first all-paperbound bookshop in the country. Two years later, after the departure of Martin, he launched the publishing wing of City Lights with his own first book of poems, Pictures of the Gone World, the first number in the Pocket Poets Series
. This volume was followed by books by Kenneth Rexroth
, Kenneth Patchen
, Marie Ponsot
, Allen Ginsberg
, Denise Levertov
, Robert Duncan
, William Carlos Williams
, and Gregory Corso
. Although City Lights Publishers is best known for its publication of Beat Generation
writers, Ferlinghetti never intended to publish the Beats exclusively, and the press has always maintained a strong international list.
City Lights Publishers expanded its list from poetry to include prose, including novels, biography, memoirs, essays and cultural studies. In 1972, City Lights published a collection of short stories by Charles Bukowski
, Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness
(since republished in two volumes, Tales of Ordinary Madness
and The Most Beautiful Woman in Town
). Subsequently it took over publication of Bukowski's collection of "Notes of a Dirty Old Man
" columns for Open City
from the pornography publisher Essex House (publisher)
in the early 1970s. Since then, it has published a sequel to Notes and a book of ephemera by Bukowski.
Other prose works include Neal Cassady
's memoir The First Third, Edie Kerouac-Parker's memoir of her life with Jack Kerouac
, and William S. Burroughs
's "Yage Letters" to Allen Ginsberg and other ephemera. It has also published political books by prominent authors, including Noam Chomsky
, Tom Hayden
, and Howard Zinn
. Books published in translation include such authors as Georges Bataille
, Bertolt Brecht
, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
.
was Allen Ginsberg
’s Howl
. Ferlinghetti was in attendance at the now-famous Six Gallery reading
where Ginsberg first performed Howl publicly. The next day Ferlinghetti telegrammed Ginsberg: "I greet you at the beginning of a great literary career," subsequently offering to publish his work.
The book was seized in 1956 by the San Francisco police. Ferlinghetti and Shig Murao
, the bookstore manager who had sold the book to the police, were arrested on obscenity charges. After charges against Murao were dropped, Ferlinghetti, defended by Jake Ehrlich
and the American Civil Liberties Union
, stood trial in SF Municipal court. The publicity generated by the trial drew national attention to San Francisco Renaissance
and Beat movement writers. Ferlinghetti had the support of prestigious literary and academic figures, and, at the end of a long trial, Judge Clayton W. Horn found Howl not obscene and acquitted him in October 1957. The landmark First Amendment
case established a key legal precedent for the publication of other controversial literary work with redeeming social importance.
In 2010, Andrew Rogers portrays Ferlinghetti in the film Howl.
their headquarters when they were in San Francisco. He has often claimed that he was not a Beat, but a bohemian of an earlier generation. A married war veteran and a bookstore proprietor, he didn’t share the high (or low) life of the beats on the road. Kerouac wrote Ferlinghetti into the character “Lorenzo Monsanto” in his autobiographical novel Big Sur
(1962), the story of Jack’s stay (with the Cassadys, the McClures, Lenore Kandel
, Lew Welch
, and Philip Whalen
) at Ferlinghetti’s cabin in the wild coastal region of Big Sur
. Kerouac depicts the Ferlinghetti figure as a generous and good-humored host, in the midst of Dionysian
revels and breakdowns.
Over the years Ferlinghetti published work by many of the Beats, including Allen Ginsberg
, Jack Kerouac
, Gregory Corso
, William S. Burroughs
, Diane diPrima, Michael McClure
, Philip Lamantia
, Bob Kaufman
, and Gary Snyder
. He was Ginsberg
’s publisher for over thirty years. When the Indian poets of the Hungryalists literary movement were arrested in 1964 at Kolkata
, Ferlinghetti introduced the Hungryalist poets to Western readers through the initial issues of City Lights Journal.
Though imbued with the commonplace, Ferlinghetti’s poetry is grounded in lyric and narrative traditions. Among his themes are the beauty of natural world, the tragicomic life of the common man, the plight of the individual in mass society, and the dream and betrayal of democracy. He counts among his influences T. S. Eliot
, Ezra Pound
, e. e. cummings
, H.D.
, Marcel Proust
, Charles Baudelaire
, Jacques Prévert
, Guillaume Apollinaire
, and Blaise Cendrars
. One of his poems, 'Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes', is now a poem studied at GCSE level in England and Wales, as part of the collection of poems in the AQA Anthology.
whose concepts of philosophical anarchism influenced his political development. He self-identifies as a philosophical anarchist
, regularly associated with other anarchists in North Beach
, and sold Italian anarchist newspapers at the City Lights Bookstore
. A critic of US foreign policy, Ferlinghetti has taken a stand against totalitarianism and war.
While Ferlinghetti has expressed that he is "an anarchist at heart," he concedes that the world would need to be populated by "saints" in order for pure anarchism to be lived practically. Hence he espouses what can be achieved by Scandinavian-style democratic socialism.
Ferlinghetti's work challenges the definition of art and the artist’s role in the world. He urged poets to be engaged in the political and cultural life of the country. As he writes in Populist Manifesto: "Poets, come out of your closets, Open your windows, open your doors, You have been holed up too long in your closed worlds... Poetry should transport the public/to higher places/than other wheels can carry it..."
In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.
Ferlinghetti was instrumental in bringing poetry out of the academy and back into the public sphere with public poetry readings. With Ginsberg
and other progressive writers, he took part in events that focused on such political issues as the Cuban revolution, the nuclear arms race
, farm-worker organizing, the murder of Salvador Allende
, the Vietnam War
, May ’68 in Paris, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua
, and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation
in Mexico
. He read not only to audiences in the United States
but widely in Europe
and Latin America
. Many of his writings grew from travels in France
, Italy
, the Soviet Union
, Cuba
, Mexico
, Chile
, Nicaragua
, and the Czech Republic
.
in 1948. In San Francisco, he occupied a studio at 9 Mission Street on the Embarcadero in the 1950s that he inherited from Hassel Smith. He admired the New York abstract expressionists, and his first work exhibits their influence. A more figurative style is apparent in his later work. Ferlinghetti’s paintings have been shown at various museums around the world, from the Butler Museum of American Painting to Il Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome
. He has been associated with the international Fluxus
movement through the Archivio Francesco Conz in Verona
. In San Francisco, his work can regularly be seen at the George Krevsky Gallery.
60 years of painting, the exhibition held in Italy
in 2010 (Rome
: February–April; Reggio Calabria
: May - July) is a creative journey through the twentieth century, reflecting on social and political issues and on the role of the artist nowadays.
, located at the side of his shop. He presented his idea to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors
calling for repavement and renewal. Since 1991, young volunteers from the Adopt-An-Alleyway Youth Empowerment Project
— a program run by the Chinatown Community Development Center
— have maintained the good condition of the alley, which is a bridge between Chinatown and North Beach.
’ Robert Kirsch Award, the BABRA Award for Lifetime Achievement, the National Book Critics Circle
Ivan Sandrof Award for Contribution to American Arts and Letters, and the ACLU’s Earl Warren
Civil Liberties Award. He won the Premio Taormino in 1973, and since then has been awarded the Premio Camaiore, the Premio Flaiano, the Premio Cavour, among other honors in Italy
. Ferlinghetti was named San Francisco’s Poet Laureate in August 1998 and served for two years. In 2003 he was awarded the Robert Frost
Memorial Medal, the Author’s Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2003. The National Book Foundation
made him the recipient of its first Literarian Award (2005), given for outstanding service to the American literary community. In 2007 he was named Commandeur, French Order of Arts and Letters.
Since 2009 he has been in the Honour Committee of IMMAGINE&POESIA
, the artistic literary movement founded in Turin
, Italy
, with the patronage of Aeronwy Thomas
(Dylan Thomas
's daughter).
in 1957, were recorded by Henry Jacobs
and are featured on the Meat Beat Manifesto
album At the Center, mistakenly credited to Kenneth Rexroth
. Ferlinghetti gave Canadian punk band Propagandhi
permission to use his painting The Unfinished Flag of the United States, which features a map of the world painted in the stars and stripes, as the cover of their 2001 release Today's Empires, Tomorrow's Ashes
. Before this, the same painting was used for the cover of Michael Parenti
's 1995 book, Against Empire, which was published by City Lights.
Ferlinghetti recited the poem Loud Prayer at The Band
's final performance. Titled The Last Waltz
, this concert was filmed by Martin Scorsese
and released as a documentary which included Ferlinghetti's recitation. Julio Cortázar, in his Rayuela
(Hopscotch) (1963) references a poem by Ferlinghetti in Chapter 121.He appears as himself in the 2006 comedy film The Darwin Awards
. Bob Dylan
used Ferlinghetti's "Baseball Canto", on the Baseball show of Theme Time Radio Hour. Roger McGuinn
, the former leader of the Byrds, referred to Ferlinghetti and "A Coney Island of the Mind" in his song "Russian Hill," from his 1977 album Thunderbyrd
. Cyndi Lauper
was inspired by A Coney Island of the Mind to write the song "Into the Nightlife
" for her 2008 album Bring Ya to the Brink
.
The Blue Devils Drum and Bugle Corps
's 2008 marching show was entitled Constantly Risking Absurdity, with movements titled after various lines in Ferlinghetti's poem. The corps took second place at the Drum Corps International
Finals. Aztec Two-Step is an American folk-rock band formed by Rex Fowler and Neal Shulman at a chance meeting on open stage at a Boston coffee house, the Stone Phoenix[1], in 1971. The band was named after a line from the poem "A Coney Island of the Mind" by Ferlinghetti. Bristol Sound band Unforscene used Ferlinghetti's poem "Pictures of the Gone World 11" (or "The World is a Beautiful Place...") in the song The Word Is on its 2002 album New World Disorder.
In 2011 Ferlinghetti contributed two of his poems to the celebration of the 150th Anniversary of Italian unification
: Song of the Third World War and Old Italians Dying inspired the artists of the exhibition Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Italy 150 held in Turin
, Italy
(May - June 2011).
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
, painter
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
, liberal activist
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers
City Lights Bookstore
City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence...
. Author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, he is best known for A Coney Island of the Mind
A Coney Island of the Mind
A Coney Island of the Mind is a collection of poetry by Lawrence Ferlinghetti originally published in 1958. It contains some of Ferlinghetti's most famous poems, such as "I Am Waiting", and "Junkman's Obbligato", which were created for jazz accompaniment...
(New York: New Directions
New Directions Publishers
New Directions Publishing Corp. is an independent book publishing company that was founded in 1936 by James Laughlin. The company was incorporated in 1964 as the New Directions Publishing Corporation and operates from New York City, and its books today are distributed by WW Norton & Company. Its...
, 1958), a collection of poems that has been translated into nine languages, with sales of over 1 million copies.
Early life
Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New YorkYonkers, New York
Yonkers is the fourth most populous city in the state of New York , and the most populous city in Westchester County, with a population of 195,976...
on March 24, 1919. His mother, née Lyons Albertine Mendes-Monsanto was of French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, Portuguese
Portugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...
Sephardic Jewish heritage. His father, Carlo Ferlinghetti, was born in Brescia
Brescia
Brescia is a city and comune in the region of Lombardy in northern Italy. It is situated at the foot of the Alps, between the Mella and the Naviglio, with a population of around 197,000. It is the second largest city in Lombardy, after the capital, Milan...
, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
in 1872. He immigrated to the United States in 1892, and worked as an auctioneer in Little Italy, NYC. At some unknown point, Carlo Ferlinghetti shortened the family name to "Ferling," and Lawrence wouldn't learn of his original name until 1942, when he had to provide a birth certificate to join the US Navy. Though he used "Ferling" for his earliest published work, Ferlinghetti reverted to the original Italian "Ferlinghetti" in 1955, when publishing his first book of poems, Pictures of the Gone World.
Ferlinghetti's father died six months before he was born, and his mother was committed to an asylum shortly after his birth. He was raised by his French aunt Emily, former wife of Ludovico Monsanto, an uncle of his mother from the Virgin Islands who taught Spanish at the U.S. Naval Academy. Emily took Ferlinghetti to Strasbourg
Strasbourg
Strasbourg is the capital and principal city of the Alsace region in eastern France and is the official seat of the European Parliament. Located close to the border with Germany, it is the capital of the Bas-Rhin département. The city and the region of Alsace are historically German-speaking,...
, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, where they lived during his first five years, with French as his first language.
After their return to the U.S., Ferlinghetti was placed in an orphanage in Chappaqua, N.Y. while Emily looked for employment. She was eventually hired as a French governess for the daughter of Presley Eugene Bisland and his wife Anna Lawrence Bisland, in Bronxville, New York
Bronxville, New York
Bronxville is an affluent village within the town of Eastchester, New York, in the United States. It is a suburb of New York City, located approximately north of midtown Manhattan in southern Westchester County. At the 2010 census, Bronxville had a population of 6,323...
, the latter being the daughter of the founder of Sarah Lawrence College
Sarah Lawrence College
Sarah Lawrence College is a private liberal arts college in the United States, and a leader in progressive education since its founding in 1926. Located just 30 minutes north of Midtown Manhattan in southern Westchester County, New York, in the city of Yonkers, this coeducational college offers...
, William Van Duzer Lawrence
William Van Duzer Lawrence
William Van Duzer Lawrence was a millionaire real-estate and pharmaceutical mogul who is best known for having founded Sarah Lawrence College in 1926. He played a critical role in the development of the community of Bronxville, New York, an affluent suburb of New York City defined by magnificent...
. They resided at the Plashbourne Estate
Plashbourne Estate
Plashbourne Estate is a historic estate located in the Lawrence Park West section of Yonkers, Westchester County, New York. It was designed in 1911 by the noted architectural firm of Carrère and Hastings and built for artist Violet Oakley in the Tudor Revival style. It is a -story stone building...
. In 1926, Ferlinghetti was left in the care of the Bislands. After attending various schools, including Riverdale Country School, Bronxville Public School, and Mount Hermon School (now Northfield Mount Hermon School), he went to the University of North Carolina
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public research university located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States...
in Chapel Hill, where he earned a B.A. in journalism in 1941. Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an Eagle Scout
Eagle Scout (Boy Scouts of America)
Eagle Scout is the highest rank attainable in the Boy Scouting program of the Boy Scouts of America . A Scout who attains this rank is called an Eagle Scout or Eagle. Since its introduction in 1911, the Eagle Scout rank has been earned by more than 2 million young men...
in the Boy Scouts of America
Boy Scouts of America
The Boy Scouts of America is one of the largest youth organizations in the United States, with over 4.5 million youth members in its age-related divisions...
. His sports journalism was published in The Daily Tar Heel
The Daily Tar Heel
The Daily Tar Heel is the independent student newspaper of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was founded on February 23, 1893, and became a daily newspaper in 1929. The paper places a focus on university news and sports, but it also includes heavy coverage of Orange County and...
, and he published his first short stories in Carolina Magazine, for which Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Clayton Wolfe was a major American novelist of the early 20th century.Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels, plus many short stories, dramatic works and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing...
had written.
World War II
In the summer of 1941, he lived with two college mates on Little Whale Boat Island in Casco Bay, Maine, lobster fishing, and raking moss from rocks to be sold in Portland, Maine, for pharmaceutical use. This experience gave him a love of the sea, a theme that runs through much of his poetry. After the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl HarborPearl Harbor
Pearl Harbor, known to Hawaiians as Puuloa, is a lagoon harbor on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, west of Honolulu. Much of the harbor and surrounding lands is a United States Navy deep-water naval base. It is also the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Fleet...
, Ferlinghetti enrolled in Midshipmen’s school in Chicago, and in 1942 shipped out as junior officer on J. P. Morgan III
Junius Spencer Morgan III
Junius Spencer Morgan III , was an American banker as the director of the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company-References:...
's yacht, which had been refitted to patrol for submarines off the East Coast.
Ferlinghetti was next assigned to the Ambrose Lightship outside New York harbor, to identify all incoming ships. In 1943 and 1944 he served as an officer on three U.S. Navy subchasers used as convoy escorts. As commander of the subchaser USS SC1308, he was at the Normandy
Normandy
Normandy is a geographical region corresponding to the former Duchy of Normandy. It is in France.The continental territory covers 30,627 km² and forms the preponderant part of Normandy and roughly 5% of the territory of France. It is divided for administrative purposes into two régions:...
invasion as part of the anti-submarine screen around the beaches. After VE Day, the Navy transferred him to the Pacific Theater, where he served as navigator of the troop ship USS Selinur
USS Selinur (AKA-41)
USS Selinur was an named after the minor planet 500 Selinur, which in turn was named for a character in Friedrich Theodor Vischer's 1879 novel Auch Einer...
. Six weeks after the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki, he visited the ruins of the city, an experience that turned him into a life-long pacifist.
Columbia University & The Sorbonne
After the war, he worked briefly in the mailroom at Time magazine, in ManhattanManhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
. The G.I. Bill then enabled him to enroll in the Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
graduate school. Among his professors there were Babette Deutsch
Babette Deutsch
Babette Deutsch was an American poet, critic, translator, and novelist.Born in New York City, the daughter of Michael and Melanie Deutsch, she matriculated from the Ethical Culture School and Barnard College, graduating in 1917 with a B.A...
, Lionel Trilling
Lionel Trilling
Lionel Trilling was an American literary critic, author, and teacher. With wife Diana Trilling, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review. Although he did not establish a school of literary criticism, he is one of the leading U.S...
, Jacques Barzun
Jacques Barzun
Jacques Martin Barzun is a French-born American historian of ideas and culture. He has written on a wide range of topics, but is perhaps best known as a philosopher of education, his Teacher in America being a strong influence on post-WWII training of schoolteachers in the United...
, and Mark Van Doren
Mark Van Doren
Mark Van Doren was an American poet, writer and a critic, apart from being a scholar and a professor of English at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, where he inspired a generation of influential writers and thinkers including Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, John Berryman, and Beat Generation...
. In those years he was reading modern literature, and has said he was at that time influenced particularly by Shakespeare, Marlowe
Marlowe
- People :Given name* Marlowe Gardiner-Heslin , Canadian actor* Marlowe Morris , American jazz musicianSurname* Andrew W...
, the Romantic poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. was an English poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous 20th-century fame established him among the leading Victorian poets...
, and James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
, as well as American poets Whitman
Whitman
-People:* Whitman , including:*Charles Whitman, tower sniper *Charles S. Whitman, New York politician *Walt Whitman, American essayist and poet *Marcus Whitman, was an American physician and Oregon missionary....
, T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg was an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for his poetry and another for a biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Carl Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat."-Biography:Sandburg was born in Galesburg,...
, Vachel Lindsay
Vachel Lindsay
Nicholas Vachel Lindsay was an American poet. He is considered the father of modern singing poetry, as he referred to it, in which verses are meant to be sung or chanted...
, Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore was an American Modernist poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.- Life :Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of mechanical engineer and inventor...
, E. E. Cummings
E. E. Cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings , popularly known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e.e. cummings , was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright...
, and American novelists Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Clayton Wolfe was a major American novelist of the early 20th century.Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels, plus many short stories, dramatic works and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing...
, Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
, and John Dos Passos
John Dos Passos
John Roderigo Dos Passos was an American novelist and artist.-Early life:Born in Chicago, Illinois, Dos Passos was the illegitimate son of John Randolph Dos Passos , a distinguished lawyer of Madeiran Portuguese descent, and Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison of Petersburg, Virginia. The elder Dos Passos...
. He earned a master’s degree in English literature in 1947 with a thesis on John Ruskin
John Ruskin
John Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects ranging from geology to architecture, myth to ornithology, literature to education, and botany to political...
and the British painter J. M. W. Turner
J. M. W. Turner
Joseph Mallord William Turner RA was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting...
. From Columbia, he went to Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
to continue his studies, and lived in the city between 1947 and 1951, earning a Doctorat de l’Université de Paris, with a “mention très honorable.” His two theses were on the city as a symbol in modern poetry and on the nature of Gothic.
San Francisco — City Lights Books
After marrying Selden Kirby-Smith in 1951 in Duval County, FloridaDuval County, Florida
Duval County is a county located in the U.S. state of Florida. As of 2010, the population was 864,263. Its county seat is Jacksonville, with which the Duval County government has been consolidated since 1968...
, he settled in San Francisco in 1953, where he taught French in an adult education program, painted, and wrote art criticism. His first translations, of poems by the French surrealist Jacques Prévert
Jacques Prévert
Jacques Prévert was a French poet and screenwriter. His poems became and remain very popular in the French-speaking world, particularly in schools. Some of the movies he wrote are extremely well regarded, with Les Enfants du Paradis considered one of the greatest films of all time.-Life and...
, were published by Peter D. Martin in his popular culture magazine City Lights.
In 1953, Ferlinghetti and Martin founded City Lights Bookstore
City Lights Bookstore
City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence...
, the first all-paperbound bookshop in the country. Two years later, after the departure of Martin, he launched the publishing wing of City Lights with his own first book of poems, Pictures of the Gone World, the first number in the Pocket Poets Series
City Lights Pocket Poets Series
The City Lights Pocket Poets Series is a series of poetry collections published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books of San Francisco since August 1955...
. This volume was followed by books by Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement...
, Kenneth Patchen
Kenneth Patchen
Kenneth Patchen was an American poet and novelist. Though he denied any direct connection, Patchen's work and ideas regarding the role of artists paralleled those of the Dadaists, the Beats, and Surrealists...
, Marie Ponsot
Marie Ponsot
Marie Ponsot, née Birmingham is an American poet, literary critic, essayist, teacher, and translator.-Life:Ponsot was born in Brooklyn, New York, but along with her brother grew up in Jamaica, Queens. She was already writing poems as a child, some of which were published in the Brooklyn Daily...
, Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
, Denise Levertov
Denise Levertov
-Early life and influences:Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Essex.Couzyn, Jeni Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe, p74 Her mother, Beatrice Spooner-Jones Levertoff, came from a small mining village in North Wales...
, Robert Duncan
Robert Duncan (poet)
Robert Duncan was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black...
, William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
, and Gregory Corso
Gregory Corso
Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers...
. Although City Lights Publishers is best known for its publication of Beat Generation
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
writers, Ferlinghetti never intended to publish the Beats exclusively, and the press has always maintained a strong international list.
City Lights Publishers expanded its list from poetry to include prose, including novels, biography, memoirs, essays and cultural studies. In 1972, City Lights published a collection of short stories by Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski
Henry Charles Bukowski was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles...
, Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness
Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness
Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness was a paperback collection of short stories by Charles Bukowski, first published by City Lights Publishers in 1972. It was the first collection of Bukowski's stories to be published, and it was republished in two volumes in...
(since republished in two volumes, Tales of Ordinary Madness
Tales of Ordinary Madness (book)
Tales of Ordinary Madness is one of two collections of short stories by Charles Bukowski that City Lights Publishers culled from its 1972 paperback volume Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness. . Both volumes were first published in 1983 and remain in print....
and The Most Beautiful Woman in Town
The Most Beautiful Woman In Town
The Most Beautiful Woman in Town & Other Stories is a collection of anecdotal short stories by American author Charles Bukowski. The stories are written in both the first and third-person, in Bukowski's trademark semi-autobiographical short prose style. In keeping with his other works, themes...
). Subsequently it took over publication of Bukowski's collection of "Notes of a Dirty Old Man
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
Notes of a Dirty Old Man is a collection of underground newspaper articles written by Charles Bukowski that were retrieved and published from Essex House in the Open City newspapers and into the paperback series Notes of a Dirty Old Man. His short series was written with a crude humor yet truthful...
" columns for Open City
Open City (newspaper)
Open City was a weekly underground newspaper published in Los Angeles by avant-garde journalist John Bryan from May 6, 1967 to April 1969. It was noted for its coverage of radical politics, rock music, psychedelic culture and the "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" column by Charles Bukowski.-Founder:John...
from the pornography publisher Essex House (publisher)
Essex House
-Buildings:* Essex House - a historic house in London* Jumeirah Essex House - a luxury hotel in New York City...
in the early 1970s. Since then, it has published a sequel to Notes and a book of ephemera by Bukowski.
Other prose works include Neal Cassady
Neal Cassady
Neal Leon Cassady was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic movement of the 1960s. He served as the model for the character Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road....
's memoir The First Third, Edie Kerouac-Parker's memoir of her life with Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
, and William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
's "Yage Letters" to Allen Ginsberg and other ephemera. It has also published political books by prominent authors, including Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
, Tom Hayden
Tom Hayden
Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden is an American social and political activist and politician, known for his involvement in the animal rights, and the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s. He is the former husband of actress Jane Fonda and the father of actor Troy Garity.-Life and...
, and Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn was an American historian, academic, author, playwright, and social activist. Before and during his tenure as a political science professor at Boston University from 1964-88 he wrote more than 20 books, which included his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United...
. Books published in translation include such authors as Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille was a French writer. His multifaceted work is linked to the domains of literature, anthropology, philosophy, economy, sociology and history of art...
, Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the...
, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer, pictorial artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and polymath. He is considered the supreme genius of modern German literature. His works span the fields of poetry, drama, prose, philosophy, and science. His Faust has been called the greatest long...
.
The Howl trial
The fourth number in the Pocket Poets SeriesCity Lights Pocket Poets Series
The City Lights Pocket Poets Series is a series of poetry collections published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books of San Francisco since August 1955...
was Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
’s Howl
Howl
"Howl" is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1955 and published as part of his 1956 collection of poetry titled Howl and Other Poems. The poem is considered to be one of the great works of the Beat Generation, along with Jack Kerouac's On the Road and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch...
. Ferlinghetti was in attendance at the now-famous Six Gallery reading
Six Gallery reading
The Six Gallery reading was a poetry-reading which occurred at the Six Gallery on Friday, October 7, 1955, at 3119 Fillmore Street in San Francisco....
where Ginsberg first performed Howl publicly. The next day Ferlinghetti telegrammed Ginsberg: "I greet you at the beginning of a great literary career," subsequently offering to publish his work.
The book was seized in 1956 by the San Francisco police. Ferlinghetti and Shig Murao
Shig Murao
Shigeyoshi "Shig" Murao is mainly remembered as the City Lights clerk who was arrested on June 3, 1957, for selling Allen Ginsberg's Howl to an undercover San Francisco police officer. In the trial that followed, Murao was charged with selling the book and Lawrence Ferlinghetti with publishing it...
, the bookstore manager who had sold the book to the police, were arrested on obscenity charges. After charges against Murao were dropped, Ferlinghetti, defended by Jake Ehrlich
Jake Ehrlich
- Biography :Born near Rockville, Montgomery County, Maryland. Known as "the Master," Jake Ehrlich had a fifty year career as a defense and divorce attorney in San Francisco. He authored a dozen books on the law, the Bible, and his own life story...
and the American Civil Liberties Union
American Civil Liberties Union
The American Civil Liberties Union is a U.S. non-profit organization whose stated mission is "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States." It works through litigation, legislation, and...
, stood trial in SF Municipal court. The publicity generated by the trial drew national attention to San Francisco Renaissance
San Francisco Renaissance
The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range of poetic activity centered on San Francisco and which brought it to prominence as a hub of the American poetic avant-garde. However, others The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range...
and Beat movement writers. Ferlinghetti had the support of prestigious literary and academic figures, and, at the end of a long trial, Judge Clayton W. Horn found Howl not obscene and acquitted him in October 1957. The landmark First Amendment
First Amendment to the United States Constitution
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering...
case established a key legal precedent for the publication of other controversial literary work with redeeming social importance.
In 2010, Andrew Rogers portrays Ferlinghetti in the film Howl.
The Beats
Although in style and theme Ferlinghetti’s own writing is very unlike that of the original NY Beat circle, he had important associations with the Beat writers, who made City Lights BookstoreCity Lights Bookstore
City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence...
their headquarters when they were in San Francisco. He has often claimed that he was not a Beat, but a bohemian of an earlier generation. A married war veteran and a bookstore proprietor, he didn’t share the high (or low) life of the beats on the road. Kerouac wrote Ferlinghetti into the character “Lorenzo Monsanto” in his autobiographical novel Big Sur
Big Sur (novel)
Big Sur is a 1962 novel by Jack Kerouac. It recounts the events surrounding Kerouac's three brief sojourns to a cabin in Bixby Canyon, Big Sur, owned by Kerouac's friend and Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti...
(1962), the story of Jack’s stay (with the Cassadys, the McClures, Lenore Kandel
Lenore Kandel
Lenore Kandel was an American poet.Kandel was briefly notorious as the author of a short book of poetry, The Love Book...
, Lew Welch
Lew Welch
Lewis Barrett Welch, Jr. was an American poet associated with the Beat generation of poets, artists, and iconoclasts.Welch published and performed widely during the 1960s...
, and Philip Whalen
Philip Whalen
Philip Glenn Whalen was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and close to the Beat generation.-Biography:...
) at Ferlinghetti’s cabin in the wild coastal region of Big Sur
Big Sur
Big Sur is a sparsely populated region of the Central Coast of California where the Santa Lucia Mountains rise abruptly from the Pacific Ocean. The name "Big Sur" is derived from the original Spanish-language "el sur grande", meaning "the big south", or from "el país grande del sur", "the big...
. Kerouac depicts the Ferlinghetti figure as a generous and good-humored host, in the midst of Dionysian
Dionysus
Dionysus was the god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness and ecstasy in Greek mythology. His name in Linear B tablets shows he was worshipped from c. 1500—1100 BC by Mycenean Greeks: other traces of Dionysian-type cult have been found in ancient Minoan Crete...
revels and breakdowns.
Over the years Ferlinghetti published work by many of the Beats, including Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
, Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
, Gregory Corso
Gregory Corso
Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers...
, William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
, Diane diPrima, Michael McClure
Michael McClure
Michael McClure is an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955 rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums...
, Philip Lamantia
Philip Lamantia
Philip Lamantia was an American poet and lecturer. Lamantia's visionary poems were ecstatic, terror-filled, and erotic which explored the subconscious world of dreams and linked it to the experience of daily life.-Biography:...
, Bob Kaufman
Bob Kaufman
Bob Kaufman , born Robert Garnell Kaufman, was an American Beat poet and surrealist inspired by jazz music. In France, where his poetry had a large following, he was known as the "American Rimbaud."-Biography:...
, and Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder is an American poet , as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist . Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry...
. He was Ginsberg
Ginsberg
Ginsberg, Ginsburg, Ginsburgh, Ginsparg, Ginzberg, Ginzborg, and Ginzburg are variants of the same surname.-Ginsberg:* Allen Ginsberg, Beat poet* Asher Hirsch Ginsberg , Zionist writer and philosopher...
’s publisher for over thirty years. When the Indian poets of the Hungryalists literary movement were arrested in 1964 at Kolkata
Kolkata
Kolkata , formerly known as Calcutta, is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. Located on the east bank of the Hooghly River, it was the commercial capital of East India...
, Ferlinghetti introduced the Hungryalist poets to Western readers through the initial issues of City Lights Journal.
Poetry
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, e. e. cummings
E. E. Cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings , popularly known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e.e. cummings , was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright...
, H.D.
H.D.
H.D. was an American poet, novelist and memoirist known for her association with the early 20th century avant-garde Imagist group of poets such as Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington...
, Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
, Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...
, Jacques Prévert
Jacques Prévert
Jacques Prévert was a French poet and screenwriter. His poems became and remain very popular in the French-speaking world, particularly in schools. Some of the movies he wrote are extremely well regarded, with Les Enfants du Paradis considered one of the greatest films of all time.-Life and...
, Guillaume Apollinaire
Guillaume Apollinaire
Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother....
, and Blaise Cendrars
Blaise Cendrars
Frédéric Louis Sauser , better known as Blaise Cendrars, was a Swiss novelist and poet naturalized French in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the modernist movement.-Early years:...
. One of his poems, 'Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes', is now a poem studied at GCSE level in England and Wales, as part of the collection of poems in the AQA Anthology.
Political engagement
Soon after settling in San Francisco in 1950, Ferlinghetti met the poet Kenneth RexrothKenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement...
whose concepts of philosophical anarchism influenced his political development. He self-identifies as a philosophical anarchist
Philosophical anarchism
Philosophical anarchism is an anarchist school of thought which contends that the state lacks moral legitimacy while not supporting violence to eliminate it...
, regularly associated with other anarchists in North Beach
North Beach, San Francisco, California
North Beach is a neighborhood in the northeast of San Francisco adjacent to Chinatown, Fisherman's Wharf and Russian Hill. The neighborhood is San Francisco's Little Italy, and has historically been home to a large Italian American population. It still holds many Italian restaurants today, though...
, and sold Italian anarchist newspapers at the City Lights Bookstore
City Lights Bookstore
City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence...
. A critic of US foreign policy, Ferlinghetti has taken a stand against totalitarianism and war.
While Ferlinghetti has expressed that he is "an anarchist at heart," he concedes that the world would need to be populated by "saints" in order for pure anarchism to be lived practically. Hence he espouses what can be achieved by Scandinavian-style democratic socialism.
Ferlinghetti's work challenges the definition of art and the artist’s role in the world. He urged poets to be engaged in the political and cultural life of the country. As he writes in Populist Manifesto: "Poets, come out of your closets, Open your windows, open your doors, You have been holed up too long in your closed worlds... Poetry should transport the public/to higher places/than other wheels can carry it..."
In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.
Ferlinghetti was instrumental in bringing poetry out of the academy and back into the public sphere with public poetry readings. With Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
and other progressive writers, he took part in events that focused on such political issues as the Cuban revolution, the nuclear arms race
Nuclear arms race
The nuclear arms race was a competition for supremacy in nuclear warfare between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies during the Cold War...
, farm-worker organizing, the murder of Salvador Allende
Salvador Allende
Salvador Allende Gossens was a Chilean physician and politician who is generally considered the first democratically elected Marxist to become president of a country in Latin America....
, the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
, May ’68 in Paris, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua
Nicaragua
Nicaragua is the largest country in the Central American American isthmus, bordered by Honduras to the north and Costa Rica to the south. The country is situated between 11 and 14 degrees north of the Equator in the Northern Hemisphere, which places it entirely within the tropics. The Pacific Ocean...
, and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation
Zapatista Army of National Liberation
The Zapatista Army of National Liberation is a revolutionary leftist group based in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico....
in Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
. He read not only to audiences in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
but widely in Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
and Latin America
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...
. Many of his writings grew from travels in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
, Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
, Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
, Chile
Chile
Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...
, Nicaragua
Nicaragua
Nicaragua is the largest country in the Central American American isthmus, bordered by Honduras to the north and Costa Rica to the south. The country is situated between 11 and 14 degrees north of the Equator in the Northern Hemisphere, which places it entirely within the tropics. The Pacific Ocean...
, and the Czech Republic
Czech Republic
The Czech Republic is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Poland to the northeast, Slovakia to the east, Austria to the south, and Germany to the west and northwest....
.
Painting
Ferlinghetti began painting in ParisParis
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
in 1948. In San Francisco, he occupied a studio at 9 Mission Street on the Embarcadero in the 1950s that he inherited from Hassel Smith. He admired the New York abstract expressionists, and his first work exhibits their influence. A more figurative style is apparent in his later work. Ferlinghetti’s paintings have been shown at various museums around the world, from the Butler Museum of American Painting to Il Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
. He has been associated with the international Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
movement through the Archivio Francesco Conz in Verona
Verona
Verona ; German Bern, Dietrichsbern or Welschbern) is a city in the Veneto, northern Italy, with approx. 265,000 inhabitants and one of the seven chef-lieus of the region. It is the second largest city municipality in the region and the third of North-Eastern Italy. The metropolitan area of Verona...
. In San Francisco, his work can regularly be seen at the George Krevsky Gallery.
60 years of painting, the exhibition held in Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
in 2010 (Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
: February–April; Reggio Calabria
Reggio Calabria
Reggio di Calabria , commonly known as Reggio Calabria or Reggio, is the biggest city and the most populated comune of Calabria, southern Italy, and is the capital of the Province of Reggio Calabria and seat of the Council of Calabrian government.Reggio is located on the "toe" of the Italian...
: May - July) is a creative journey through the twentieth century, reflecting on social and political issues and on the role of the artist nowadays.
Jack Kerouac Alley
In 1988, he was the initiator of the transformation of Jack Kerouac AlleyJack Kerouac Alley
Jack Kerouac Alley is a one-way alleyway in Chinatown, San Francisco, California, that connects Grant Avenue and Columbus Avenue....
, located at the side of his shop. He presented his idea to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors
San Francisco Board of Supervisors
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is the legislative body within the government of the City and County of San Francisco, California, United States.-Government and politics:...
calling for repavement and renewal. Since 1991, young volunteers from the Adopt-An-Alleyway Youth Empowerment Project
Adopt-An-Alleyway Youth Empowerment Project
The Adopt-An-Alleyway Youth Empowerment Project is a non-profit project of the Chinatown Community Development Center that is based in the San Francisco Chinatown area....
— a program run by the Chinatown Community Development Center
Chinatown Community Development Center
Chinatown Community Development Center is an organization in San Francisco, California which formed in 1977 after the merger of the Chinatown Resource center and the Chinese Community Housing Corporation. The organization was started by Gordon Chin, who continues to serve as Executive Director, to...
— have maintained the good condition of the alley, which is a bridge between Chinatown and North Beach.
Awards
He has received numerous awards, including the Los Angeles TimesLos Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
’ Robert Kirsch Award, the BABRA Award for Lifetime Achievement, the National Book Critics Circle
National Book Critics Circle
The National Book Critics Circle is an American tax-exempt organization for active book reviewers. Its flagship is the National Book Critics Circle Award....
Ivan Sandrof Award for Contribution to American Arts and Letters, and the ACLU’s Earl Warren
Earl Warren
Earl Warren was the 14th Chief Justice of the United States.He is known for the sweeping decisions of the Warren Court, which ended school segregation and transformed many areas of American law, especially regarding the rights of the accused, ending public-school-sponsored prayer, and requiring...
Civil Liberties Award. He won the Premio Taormino in 1973, and since then has been awarded the Premio Camaiore, the Premio Flaiano, the Premio Cavour, among other honors in Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
. Ferlinghetti was named San Francisco’s Poet Laureate in August 1998 and served for two years. In 2003 he was awarded the Robert Frost
Robert Frost
Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and...
Memorial Medal, the Author’s Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2003. The National Book Foundation
National Book Foundation
The National Book Foundation, founded in 1989, is an American nonprofit literary organization established "to raise the cultural appreciation of great writing in America." It achieves this through sponsoring the National Book Award, as well as the medal for Distinguished Contribution to American...
made him the recipient of its first Literarian Award (2005), given for outstanding service to the American literary community. In 2007 he was named Commandeur, French Order of Arts and Letters.
Since 2009 he has been in the Honour Committee of IMMAGINE&POESIA
IMMAGINE&POESIA
__notoc__IMAGE&POETRY is an international artistic literary movement, founded at Alfa Teatro, Torino, Italy in 2007. The main ideas of the movement have been written in their manifesto consisting of 10 points...
, the artistic literary movement founded in Turin
Turin
Turin is a city and major business and cultural centre in northern Italy, capital of the Piedmont region, located mainly on the left bank of the Po River and surrounded by the Alpine arch. The population of the city proper is 909,193 while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat...
, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, with the patronage of Aeronwy Thomas
Aeronwy Thomas
Aeronwy Bryn Thomas-Ellis translator of Italian poetry, was the second child and only daughter of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and his wife, Caitlin Macnamara.-Early life:...
(Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...
's daughter).
In pop culture
The Italian band Timoria dedicated the song Ferlinghetti Blues (from the album El Topo Grand Hotel) to the poet, where Ferlinghetti himself speaks one of his poems. Recordings of Ferlinghetti reading want ads, as featured on radio station KPFAKPFA
KPFA is a listener-funded progressive talk radio and music radio station located in Berkeley, California, broadcasting to the San Francisco Bay Area. KPFA airs public news, public affairs, talk, and music programming. The station signed on-the-air April 15 1949, as the first Pacifica Station...
in 1957, were recorded by Henry Jacobs
Henry Jacobs
Henry Sandy Jacobs is an American sound artist and humorist.Jacobs was born in Chicago, Illinois. After a tour in the Air Corps - during which time he acquired some broadcast experience, and graduation from the University of Chicago, he moved to Mexico City...
and are featured on the Meat Beat Manifesto
Meat Beat Manifesto
Meat Beat Manifesto, often shortened to Meat Beat or MBM, is an electronic music group originally consisting of Jack Dangers and Jonny Stephens formed in 1987 in Swindon, UK...
album At the Center, mistakenly credited to Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement...
. Ferlinghetti gave Canadian punk band Propagandhi
Propagandhi
Propagandhi is a Canadian punk band formed in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba in 1986 by Chris Hannah and Jord Samolesky. The band is currently located in Winnipeg, Manitoba....
permission to use his painting The Unfinished Flag of the United States, which features a map of the world painted in the stars and stripes, as the cover of their 2001 release Today's Empires, Tomorrow's Ashes
Today's Empires, Tomorrow's Ashes
Today's Empires, Tomorrow's Ashes is the third album by Canadian punk rock band Propagandhi, released February 6, 2001.One of the album's tracks, "Back to the Motor League", indirectly refers to two songs by the Dead Kennedys, "Triumph of the Swill" and "Chickenshit Conformist", as well the year of...
. Before this, the same painting was used for the cover of Michael Parenti
Michael Parenti
Michael Parenti is an award-winning, internationally known American political scientist, historian, and culture critic who has been writing on a wide range of both scholarly and popular subjects for over forty years. He has taught at several universities and colleges and has been a frequent guest...
's 1995 book, Against Empire, which was published by City Lights.
Ferlinghetti recited the poem Loud Prayer at The Band
The Band
The Band was an acclaimed and influential roots rock group. The original group consisted of Rick Danko , Garth Hudson , Richard Manuel , and Robbie Robertson , and Levon Helm...
's final performance. Titled The Last Waltz
The Last Waltz
The Last Waltz was a concert by the rock group The Band, held on American Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1976, at Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco...
, this concert was filmed by Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese
Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation...
and released as a documentary which included Ferlinghetti's recitation. Julio Cortázar, in his Rayuela
Rayuela
Hopscotch is a novel by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. Written in Paris and published in Spanish in 1963 and in English in 1966, the English translation by Gregory Rabassa won the 1967 U.S. National Book Award. Hopscotch is an introspective stream-of-consciousness novel where characters...
(Hopscotch) (1963) references a poem by Ferlinghetti in Chapter 121.He appears as himself in the 2006 comedy film The Darwin Awards
The Darwin Awards (film)
The Darwin Awards is a 2006 American adventure comedy film based on the website of the same name.Written and directed by Finn Taylor, the film premiered January 25, 2006, at the Sundance Film Festival...
. Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
used Ferlinghetti's "Baseball Canto", on the Baseball show of Theme Time Radio Hour. Roger McGuinn
Roger McGuinn
James Roger McGuinn is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. He is best known for being the lead singer and lead guitarist on many of The Byrds' records...
, the former leader of the Byrds, referred to Ferlinghetti and "A Coney Island of the Mind" in his song "Russian Hill," from his 1977 album Thunderbyrd
Thunderbyrd
Thunderbyrd is American singer-songwriter and guitarist Roger McGuinn's 5th solo studio album, released in 1977 on the Columbia Records label. Following the success of his 1976 album Cardiff Rose, McGuinn intended to make another album in collaboration with its producer Mick Ronson. This project...
. Cyndi Lauper
Cyndi Lauper
Cynthia Ann Stephanie "Cyndi" Lauper is an American singer, songwriter, actress and LGBT rights activist. She achieved success in the mid-1980s with the release of the album She's So Unusual and became the first female singer to have four top-five singles released from one album...
was inspired by A Coney Island of the Mind to write the song "Into the Nightlife
Into the Nightlife
"Into the Nightlife" is a song written by Cyndi Lauper, Peer Åström, Johan Bobäck and Max Martin, and produced by Lauper, Åström and Bobäck, for Lauper's tenth studio album Bring Ya to the Brink. It peaked at #1 on the U.S Billboard Hot Dance Club Play and on the Cashbox Top Dance Singles...
" for her 2008 album Bring Ya to the Brink
Bring Ya to the Brink
Bring Ya to the Brink is Cyndi Lauper's tenth studio album and was released on May 27, 2008 in the United States. The song "Set Your Heart" was released as a promo-only single in Japan in early 2008 and "Same Ol' Story" was the first official single released worldwide on May 6, 2008...
.
The Blue Devils Drum and Bugle Corps
Blue Devils Drum and Bugle Corps
The Blue Devils Drum and Bugle Corps is a World Class drum and bugle corps based in Concord, California and founded in 1957 as a Drum and Bell corps, and is a member corps of Drum Corps International...
's 2008 marching show was entitled Constantly Risking Absurdity, with movements titled after various lines in Ferlinghetti's poem. The corps took second place at the Drum Corps International
Drum Corps International
Drum Corps International , formed in 1972, is the non-profit governing body operating the North American drum and bugle corps circuit for junior corps, whose members are between the ages of 14 and 21. It is the counterpart of Drum Corps Associates which governs senior or all-age drum corps...
Finals. Aztec Two-Step is an American folk-rock band formed by Rex Fowler and Neal Shulman at a chance meeting on open stage at a Boston coffee house, the Stone Phoenix[1], in 1971. The band was named after a line from the poem "A Coney Island of the Mind" by Ferlinghetti. Bristol Sound band Unforscene used Ferlinghetti's poem "Pictures of the Gone World 11" (or "The World is a Beautiful Place...") in the song The Word Is on its 2002 album New World Disorder.
In 2011 Ferlinghetti contributed two of his poems to the celebration of the 150th Anniversary of Italian unification
Italian unification
Italian unification was the political and social movement that agglomerated different states of the Italian peninsula into the single state of Italy in the 19th century...
: Song of the Third World War and Old Italians Dying inspired the artists of the exhibition Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Italy 150 held in Turin
Turin
Turin is a city and major business and cultural centre in northern Italy, capital of the Piedmont region, located mainly on the left bank of the Po River and surrounded by the Alpine arch. The population of the city proper is 909,193 while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat...
, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
(May - June 2011).
Discography
- Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness (Track #8 "Dream: On A Sunny Afternoon..." with Helium) (1997) Rykodisk
- Poetry Readings in the Cellar (with the Cellar Jazz Quintet): Kenneth Rexroth & Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1957) Fantasy Records #7002 LP, (Spoken Word)
- Ferlinghetti: The Impeachment of Eisenhower (1958) Fantasy Records #7004 LP, (Spoken Word)
- Ferlinghetti: Tyrannus Nix? / Assassination Raga / Big Sur Sun Sutra / Moscow in the Wilderness (1970) Fantasy Records #7014 LP, (Spoken Word)
- A Coney Island of the Mind (1999) Rykodisk
- Pictures of the Gone World with David AmramDavid AmramDavid Amram is an American composer, musician, conductor, and writer. As a classical composer and performer, his integration of jazz , ethnic and folk music has led him to work with the likes of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Willie Nelson, Langston...
(2005) Synergy
Further reading
- 50 poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti 50 images by Armando Milani, poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and images by Armando Milani (http://www.gamonline.it/?pagina=edizioni&scheda=107 GAM Editrice, 2010)
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti - Italian Tour 2005, photographs by Walter Pescara (Nicolodi, 2006 - special edition, not for sale)
- Charters, Ann (ed.). The Portable Beat Reader. Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (pbk)
- Ferlinghetti: The Artist in His Time, by Barry Silesky (Warner Books, 1990)
- Constantly Risking Absurdity: The Writings of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, by Michael Skau (Whitson, 1989)
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Poet-at-Large, by Larry R. Smith (Southern Illinois University Press, 1983)
- Ferlinghetti: A Biography, by Neeli Cherkovski (Doubleday, 1979)
- The Beats: A Literary Reference, by Matt Theado (Carroll & Graf, 2003)
External links
- Guide to the Lawrence Ferlinghetti Papers at The Bancroft Library
- Ferlinghetti's Bookstore in San Francisco, City Lights
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti at The Soredove Press Limited Edition Poetry Chapbooks, Broadsides and Art
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti at The Beat Page Biography and Selected Poems.
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti at Literary Kicks
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti at American Poetry
- Kerouac Alley - Lawrence Ferlinghetti multimedia directory
- Amy Goodman Interview (Transcript and streaming media)
- Audio and video of reading at University of California Berkeley "Lunch Poems" series (December 1, 2005)
- Video interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti about his paintings on KQED's Spark
- Proposed International Poetry Museum by Ferlinghetti friend Herman Berlandt
- Project with IMMAGINE&POESIA for Italy 150