Trailblazer Ferlinghetti

1919 Lawrence Ferlinghetti, American Beat Generation poet, publisher and also an accomplished painter. Ferlinghetti is probably best known as the co-founder, in 1953, of the City Lights Bookstore and publishing house, the first all-paperbound bookshop in the USA.

Under Ferlinghetti's prescient direction, City Lights published early literary works of the Beats, including Jack Kerouac, Kenneth Rexroth, Gregory Corso, Philip Lamantia, Bob Kaufman, Diane di Prima, Charles Bukowski, William S Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Others published by City Lights include Sam Shepard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, André Breton, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Howard Zinn and Cindy Sheehan.

Ferlinghetti's second book, A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), a collection of poems that has been translated into nine languages, has so far enjoyed sales exceeding 1,000,000 copies ...

Categories: beat-poetry, poetry, usa, literature, biography, counterculture, progressive, book