https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/obituaries/lawrence-ferlinghetti-dead.html Sections SEARCH Skip to contentSkip to site index Books Log in Today's Paper Books|Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poet Who Nurtured the Beats, Dies at 101 * * * * * * * Advertisement Continue reading the main story Supported by Continue reading the main story Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poet Who Nurtured the Beats, Dies at 101 An unapologetic proponent of "poetry as insurgent art," he was also a publisher and the owner of the celebrated San Francisco bookstore City Lights. * * * * * * * Video transcript Back 0:00/11:10 -0:00 transcript The Last Word: Lawrence Ferlinghetti For more than 50 years, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti kept the bohemian and beat spirit alive at his City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. In 2007, he spoke to The Times about his life and legacy. "The scene shows fewer tumbrils, but more spaced-out citizens in painted cars. And they have strange license plates and engines that devour America." Lawrence Ferlinghetti was a poet, a painter, a publisher and a ceaseless political provocateur. "And I am waiting for Voznesensky to turn on with us and speak love tonight. And I am waiting for Aphrodite to grow live arms at a final disarmament conference." He penned one of the single most popular books of poetry in print, served as San Francisco's first poet laureate and won the National Book Award. Perhaps most famously, Ferlinghetti became the spiritual godfather of the Beat movement when he opened City Lights Books on a gritty hillside of San Francisco in 1953. "I had no idea of any poetry scene here or anything like that. But then when you have a bookstore, that's a place where poets naturally fall into and hang out." City Lights became a proving ground for bohemian and Beat writers and artists. Ferlinghetti soon expanded his reach by starting City Lights Press, which published the Pocket Poets Series. The first book was his own, "Pictures of the Gone World." "The dog trots freely in the street and sees reality, and the things he sees are bigger than himself." The fourth was Allen Ginsberg's explosive poem "Howl," which would shock the civilized world. "Allen Ginsberg laid his manuscript of 'Howl' on me one day. I told him I'd like to publish it, but we didn't have any money. Once I heard it aloud, I realized this was going to cause a revolution in American poetry." "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked, dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix." "It was a little like with the rock revolution that happened in the '60s. When Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' came along, you didn't hear any more about the old academic poetry for a long time." 'Howl' swept Ferlinghetti into a landmark First Amendment fight. "We were selling it at City Lights Bookstore, and two officers from the juvenile department bought a copy from Shigeyoshi Murao, who was my manager at that time. Shig was arrested, and I was indicted as the publisher and bookstore owner." The charges? "Willfully and lewdly" publishing obscene writings. "The trial went to court. We had a marvelous lineup of witnesses on our side, the most impressive literary figures in the West. When the judge brought in his decision, he said that a book cannot be judged obscene if it had the slightest redeeming social importance or social significance. And that precedent, even though this was just in the municipal court, it held up all these years. It's still very hard to convict someone of obscene literature these days." When The Times spoke with Mr. Ferlinghetti in 2007, he was 88 years old and still actively provoking. "I'm waiting for the next revolution. As a publisher, I always say, you can't publish a revolution when there isn't any." Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in 1919 in Yonkers, just north of New York City. His mother was ill, and his father died before he was born. He was raised by an aunt who worked as a servant in the home of Presley Bisland, a Southern gentleman who sparked a literary interest in the troubled boy. "He was very much like Mark Twain. He was very witty and very literate. He would get me to recite poems at the dinner table, and I would get a silver dollar if I could recite the poem perfectly. And I would start out, 'The Syrian came down like' -- 'No, no, young man, not like that.' And then he would thunder forth dramatically. As I say, I had an unhappy childhood, quote, unquote, so I escaped by lyricism. When present-day life gets too awful, there's the lyric escape. You can write a lyric poem, or you can go out and look at the moon. Or you can shack up with your best girlfriend or whatever. That's the lyric escape." Ferlinghetti studied journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After graduating in 1941, he joined the Navy. [explosions] On D-Day, Ferlinghetti was commanding a ship that provided protection for the invasion fleet at Normandy. "We were an antisubmarine screen around the beaches. We didn't have to land. And we could look through our binoculars and see these poor G.I.'s getting shot up on the beaches." After the carnage in France, Ferlinghetti was transferred to Japan, arriving soon after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. "In the towering mushroom, Japan could read its doom. This was more than a routine bombing." "As soon as I saw the devastated landscape, this burned, scorched landscape, where human flesh and teacups were melded together, and bones and fingers and faces sticking out of mud and not an erect building in sight." "Before the blast, these were modern buildings, constructed like our own American factories." "That made me an instant pacifist." Ferlinghetti decided to forge one of his lyric escapes from the Navy and use the G.I. Bill to earn advanced degrees from Columbia University and the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1951, he went west to San Francisco. "I see San Francisco from my window through some old Navy beer bottles. The glass is dark. What's it all about? Right after the Second World War, there's so many people who had been uprooted, it was as if the whole continent had tilted up, and the population slid westward. It's still the last frontier. I had an old second-hand car, and I was driving up Columbus Avenue. And I looked across the street at Columbus and Broadway, and there was this guy putting up a sign 'Pocket Book Shop.' I said, are you opening a bookstore?" Ferlinghetti decided to join forces with that man, Peter Martin, to open up a shop specializing in a new type of cheap softcover book, the paperback. "Up till then, the only paperbacks you could get were murder mysteries and some science fiction. So Peter Martin had this brilliant idea to start a paperback bookstore where you could find these books, which you couldn't find anywhere. Right from the beginning, we had poets and writers dropping in because there was nothing else like this. If you walked into any other bookstore in town, you couldn't just sit down and read. They wanted -- the clerk would be on top of you asking you what you wanted or could I help you. We actually ignored the readers. We ignored the customers. You practically had to hit the clerk over the head to buy the book." Ferlinghetti went solo when Martin left town after a couple of years, and the shop became the literary meeting place for Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, and the hero of his classic "On the Road," Neal Cassady. "Neal Cassady would dash in. He left his jalopy out front with the motor running and the door open. He would rush in and get a copy of -- and rush out. Of course, these are all free books we gave the poets." "It's already too late. Pentagon is taking care of it all, and we're doing this deliberately, as far as that goes." "The Pentagon? Tell me what --" "Well, I don't know who's running the country. Do you?" "The bookstore from the beginning had this anarchist position, which wasn't a bomb-throwing position. It was a pacifist position." "Oh." [chanting] "I mean, I remember I was at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in 1967." [chanting] "Greetings San Francisco. She's in Hanoi." "And I was sitting next to Allen Ginsberg on stage, and at one moment he turns to me and he says, 'What if we're all wrong?'" [chanting] "I wrote a poem called 'Tentative Description of a Dinner to Impeach President Eisenhower,' and now I realize that Eisenhower, compared to today's leaders in federal government -- Eisenhower was an angel." "You know, one shouldn't put down all the things that the Beats and the hippies stood for. The expansion of consciousness, this is something completely new in poetry. Religious consciousness -- they're turning toward the Far East, for instance. The first articulation of an ecological consciousness. So many things in our culture now, which we take for granted, came out of that rebellion, that youth rebellion." In 2001, City Lights was placed on the list of San Francisco's historic landmarks. "Does poetry still matter today?" "What did you put the word 'still' in there for? Yeah, does poetry still matter today? It's still -- it's a 'still.' All the disparate elements of the new civilization, the new culture of the 21st century is in this 'still.' And one of these days, the brew is going to coalesce into a marvelous, new, intoxicating liquor." Video player loading For more than 50 years, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti kept the bohemian and beat spirit alive at his City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. In 2007, he spoke to The Times about his life and legacy. CreditCredit...Brian Flaherty for The New York Times Jesse McKinley By Jesse McKinley * Feb. 23, 2021Updated 3:23 p.m. ET Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a poet, publisher and political iconoclast who inspired and nurtured generations of San Francisco artists and writers from City Lights, his famed bookstore, died on Monday at his home in San Francisco. He was 101. The cause was interstitial lung disease, his daughter, Julie Sasser, said. The spiritual godfather of the Beat movement, Mr. Ferlinghetti made his home base in the modest independent book haven now formally known as City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. A self-described "literary meeting place" founded in 1953 and located on the border of the city's sometimes swank, sometimes seedy North Beach neighborhood, City Lights, on Columbus Avenue, soon became as much a part of the San Francisco scene as the Golden Gate Bridge or Fisherman's Wharf. (The city's board of supervisors designated it a historic landmark in 2001.) While older and not a practitioner of their freewheeling personal style, Mr. Ferlinghetti befriended, published and championed many of the major Beat poets, among them Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Michael McClure. His connection to their work was exemplified -- and cemented -- in 1956 with his publication of Ginsberg's most famous poem, the ribald and revolutionary "Howl," an act that led to Mr. Ferlinghetti's arrest on charges of "willfully and lewdly" printing "indecent writings." In a significant First Amendment decision, he was acquitted, and "Howl" became one of the 20th century's best-known poems. (The trial was the centerpiece of the 2010 film "Howl," in which James Franco played Ginsberg and Andrew Rogers played Mr. Ferlinghetti.) In addition to being a champion of the Beats, Mr. Ferlinghetti was himself a prolific writer of wide talents and interests whose work evaded easy definition, mixing disarming simplicity, sharp humor and social consciousness. "Every great poem fulfills a longing and puts life back together," he wrote in a "non-lecture" after being awarded the Poetry Society of America's Frost Medal in 2003. A poem, he added, "should arise to ecstasy somewhere between speech and song." Critics and fellow poets were never in agreement about whether Mr. Ferlinghetti should be regarded as a Beat poet. He himself didn't think so. "In some ways what I really did was mind the store," he told The Guardian in 2006. "When I arrived in San Francisco in 1951 I was wearing a beret. If anything I was the last of the bohemians rather than the first of the Beats." ImageMr. Ferlinghetti, standing, in 1957 at a poetry reading. He was a prolific writer of wide talents and interests whose work evaded easy definition. Mr. Ferlinghetti, standing, in 1957 at a poetry reading. He was a prolific writer of wide talents and interests whose work evaded easy definition.Credit...Nat Farbman/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images Still, he shared the Beats' taste for political agitation. Poems like "Tentative Description of a Dinner to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower" established him as an unapologetic proponent of, as the title of one of his books put it, "poetry as insurgent art." He never lost his zeal for provocation. "You're supposed to get more conservative the older you get," he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1977. "I seem to be getting just the opposite." His most successful collection, "A Coney Island of the Mind" (1958), attracted attention when one of the poems was attacked as blasphemous by a New York congressman, Steven B. Derounian, who called for the investigation of a state college where it was being taught, saying the poem ridiculed the crucifixion of Christ. The poem, "Sometime During Eternity ...," begins: Sometime during eternity some guys show up and one of them who shows up real late is a kind of carpenter from some square-type place like Galilee and he starts wailing and claiming he is hip Despite the controversy it generated -- or perhaps, at least in part, because of it -- "A Coney Island of the Mind" was a sensation. It became one of the most successful books of American poetry ever published. It has been translated into multiple languages; according to City Lights, more than a million copies have been printed. A life as a provocateur would have been hard to predict for Lawrence Monsanto Ferling, the youngest of five sons born in the placid environs of Yonkers, N.Y., on March 24, 1919, in the wake of World War I. His father, an Italian immigrant who had built a small real estate business, had shortened the family name; as an adult, Lawrence would change it back. His parents had met in Coney Island -- a meeting he later fictionalized as happening in bumper cars -- but the veneer of normalcy quickly deteriorated. His father, Charles, died before Lawrence was born, and his mother, Clemence Mendes-Monsanto Ferling, was admitted to a state mental hospital before he was 2. Lawrence was taken in by a relative -- he called her his Aunt Emily, though the family connection was complicated -- and she took him to Strasbourg, France, where he learned French, speaking it before he did English. When they returned to the United States, hardships returned as well. He was briefly placed in an orphanage while Aunt Emily looked for work. A turning point came when she began working as a governess for Presley and Anna Bisland, a wealthy couple who lived in nearby Bronxville, N.Y., and who saw promise in the boy. Left in their care, Lawrence bloomed. According to "Ferlinghetti: The Artist in His Time," a 1990 biography by Barry Silesky, he became a voracious reader, devouring classics in the Bisland library and earning silver dollars for memorizing epic poems. When he dabbled in juvenile delinquency -- he was arrested and charged with shoplifting about the same time he made Eagle Scout -- he was sent to Mount Hermon, a strict private high school for boys in Massachusetts. "I was getting too wild," Mr. Ferlinghetti recalled in a 2007 interview with The New York Times. "Or beginning to." That sense of abandon informed his taste in literature. Among his favorite books was Thomas Wolfe's coming-of-age novel "Look Homeward, Angel"; Mr. Ferlinghetti applied to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he said later, because Wolfe had gone there. He graduated from North Carolina with a degree in journalism -- "I learned how to write a decent sentence," he said of the impact that studying journalism had had on his poetry -- and then served as a naval officer during World War II, spending much of the war on a submarine chaser in the North Atlantic. Image Mr. Ferlinghetti in 1970. He lived in the North Beach section of San Francisco for most of his adult life. Credit...Sam Falk/The New York Times After the war he enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University, where he earned a master's degree in English literature, writing his thesis on the art critic John Ruskin and the artist J.M.W. Turner, which fostered a lifelong love of painting. After Columbia, he headed to Paris, the classic breeding ground for postwar bohemians, where he received a doctorate in comparative literature from the Sorbonne. Mr. Ferlinghetti went west in early 1951, landing in San Francisco with a sea bag and little else. After months in a low-rent apartment he found North Beach, even as San Francisco itself was fast becoming fashionable among intellectuals and a generation of young people for whom "establishment" was a dirty word. "This was all bohemia," he recalled. He was surrounded by a politically and artistically charged circle, but he did not buy into the Beat lifestyle. "I was never on the road with them," he said, noting that he was living "a respectable married life" after marrying Selden Kirby-Smith in 1951. They had two children, Julie and Lorenzo; the marriage ended in divorce. In addition to Ms. Sasser, Mr. Ferlinghetti is survived by his son and three grandchildren. Mr. Ferlinghetti's life changed in 1953, when he and Peter Martin opened the City Lights Pocket Book Shop, which originally carried nothing but paperbacks at a time when the publishing industry was just beginning to take that format seriously. The store would soon became a kind of repository for books that other booksellers ignored and a kind of salon for the authors who wrote them -- a place "where you could find these books which you couldn't find anywhere," he said, crediting Mr. Martin with the concept. Each man put in $500, and City Lights opened. "And as soon as we got the door opened," Mr. Ferlinghetti later remembered, "we couldn't get it closed." In 1955 Mr. Ferlinghetti, by then the sole owner of City Lights, started publishing poems, including his own. In his first collection, "Pictures of the Gone World," his style -- "at once rhetorically functional and socially vital," in the words of the critic Larry R. Smith -- emerged fully formed in stanzas like this: The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don't mind happiness not always being so very much fun if you don't mind a touch of hell now and then just when everything is fine because even in heaven they don't sing all the time Image Mr. Ferlinghetti in 1993 in his bookstore. Age brought him honors; in 1998, for instance, he was named the first poet laureate of San Francisco.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times A year later his City Lights imprint published Ginsberg's "Howl and Other Poems," and before long he was in court defending poets' free-speech rights and helping to make himself -- and the Beats he had adopted -- famous in the process. Over the years he would work in other mediums, including painting, fiction and theater; a program of three of his plays was produced in New York in 1970. But poetry remained the art form closest to his heart. San Francisco remained close to his heart as well, especially North Beach, the traditionally Italian-American neighborhood where he lived for most of his adult life. In his 1976 poem "The Old Italians Dying," Mr. Ferlinghetti spoke to both the city he loved and the changes he'd seen: The old anarchists reading L'Umanita Nova the ones who loved Sacco & Vanzetti They are almost gone now They are sitting and waiting their turn Image City Lights bookstore, on Columbus Avenue, has become as much a part of San Francisco as the Golden Gate Bridge or Fisherman's Wharf. Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times For Mr. Ferlinghetti, age brought honors. In 1998 he was named the first poet laureate of San Francisco; in 2005 the National Book Foundation cited his "tireless work on behalf of poets and the entire literary community for over 50 years." Age did not slow him down; he continued to write and give interviews. In 2019, Doubleday published Mr. Ferlinghetti's "Little Boy," a book he had been working on for two decades, which he characterized as the closest thing to a memoir he would ever write: "an experimental novel" about "an imaginary me." Its publication coincided with Mr. Ferlinghetti's 100th birthday, which San Francisco's mayor, London Breed, proclaimed Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day. A choir serenaded the writer from below his apartment with "Happy Birthday" and "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," while at City Lights, poets like Robert Hass and Ishmael Reed read aloud from Mr. Ferlinghetti's works. In the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, City Lights closed and started an online fund-raiser in which they announced that they might not reopen. The store received more than $450,000 in four days. Its chief executive, Elaine Katzenberger, told Publishers Weekly that the money gave City Lights the ability to plan for the future. Even at the end of his life, Mr. Ferlinghetti still composed poetry -- "In flashes, nothing sustained," he told The Times in 2018. The anthology "Ferlinghetti's Greatest Poems," published in 2017, included new work. "My newest poems," Mr. Ferlinghetti once told an interviewer, "are always my favorite poems." Richard Severo, Peter Keepnews and Alex Traub contributed reporting. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Site Index Site Information Navigation * (c) 2021 The New York Times Company * NYTCo * Contact Us * Accessibility * Work with us * Advertise * T Brand Studio * Your Ad Choices * Privacy Policy * Terms of Service * Terms of Sale * Site Map * Canada * International * Help * Subscriptions