Ferlinghetti, Lawrence

FERLINGHETTI, LAWRENCE (1919-2021). Poet and founder of City Lights Books, Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti first achieved fame and notoriety as the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and later as the publisher of the works of many of the Beat Generation writers, including Jack Kerouac, Michael McClure and Gregory Corso. He remained a central, if in later years largely symbolic, figure through the role of the publishing company but also of City Lights Bookstore itself, known throughout the world as an epicenter of San Francisco’s bohemia.

Born in 1919 in Yonkers, New York, of a mixed ethnic background, Ferlinghetti was raised by an aunt of sorts who took him to France, where he learned French before he learned English. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and graduated with a degree in English. Going on to study at the Sorbonne, he earned a doctorate in comparative literature. He served in the US military during World War II, stationed in Japan shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He regarded the experience as making him a lifelong foe of nuclear weapons and the arms industry.

Ferlinghetti arrived in San Francisco in 1951 and in 1953 co-founded City Lights Bookstore with Peter Martin. For many years, the store only sold paperbacks, helping to jump start the paperback revolution but also to break down the international censorship of books.

He saw himself as an insurgent author who carried on an ancient European literary tradition that included iconic figures such as the fifteenth-century French outlaw poet, François Villon. Suspicious of the word “Beat” as a publicity stunt, he would nevertheless be fatefully associated with the Beats, hailed by them as the publisher who made their movement possible. Ferlinghetti shook up the staid cultural scene in the US that had been hammered by MCarthyism and the Cold War. Politically, he endorsed pacifism, non-violent revolution and philosophical anarchism, insisting that printer’s ink was far more powerful than a bomb.

In 1956, Ferlinghetti published Allen Ginsberg’s long epic that begins famously. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked.” He had taken the precaution of having Howl printed in England and shipped to San Francisco, where it was first confiscated and then released for an uncertain future. Anticipating trouble, he retained the services of lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union. Howl quickly became both famous and infamous as Ginsberg recited it aloud to appreciative audiences in California. Police officers bought two copies, a District Attorney charged Ferlinghetti with obscenity, and the case went to trial.

Found not guilty by Judge Clayton W. Horn, he made the best of the publicity surrounding the trial that helped make Howl a best seller and turned City Lights into a destination on the literary map of the US and beyond. Ferlinghetti also had a loyal following of his own, especially after the publication in 1958 of his second book of poetry, A Coney Island of the Mind, in which “a kind of carpenter” from “some square-type place/like Galilee…starts wailing/ and claiming he is hip.”

Published by James Laughlin at New Directions, A Coney Island of the Mind became a bestseller. Ferlinghetti helped to give birth to the counterculture, though he disliked what he regarded as its illiterate and anti-intellectual aspects. His own course of action steered him increasingly in a political direction. He supported the Cuban Revolution which brought Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and their guerrilla comrades to power in Havana.

Later, he opposed the War in Vietnam and denounced President Nixon in the poetry book, Tyrannus Nix. In his FBI file, he was described as a “Beatnik Rabble Rouser.” He continued to rouse the masses in his poetry, in pamphlets such as Poetry As Insurgent Art, and in the books he published for more than fifty years, which never came close to selling as well as Howl or Ginsberg’s other books, especially Kaddish, the Fall of America and the anti-war epic the books he published for more than fifty years, which never came close to selling as well as Wichita Vortex Sutra, which became a kind of anthem for a generation opposed to the War. Rarely if ever have an American poet and his publisher been as intimately connected as Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti.

In the last decades of his life, Ferlinghetti continued to write poetry and autobiographical fiction, couched as memoir. His mournful, yet hopeful voice are most apparent in the celebrated and much beloved poem, “I am Waiting,” in which he wrote, “I am waiting/ for a rebirth of wonder/ and I am waiting for someone/ to really discover America.” To the end of his days, he was still waiting for that rebirth of wonder.

Cherkovski, Neeli. Ferlinghetti: A Biography. New York: Doubleday, 1979.

Felver, Chris. Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder. (Documentary film), 2013.

Silesky, Barry. Ferlinghetti: The Artist in His Time. New York: Warner Books, 1990.

Documentary film: Felver, Chris. Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder, 2013.