Lawrence Ferlinghetti was a poet who co-founded and owned the famed City Lights bookstore in San Francisco and championed Beat poets including Allen Ginsberg.Ferlinghetti, a native of New York, settled in San Francisco in 1951, just as the city was beginning to become a haven for iconoclasts.
Soon after, in 1953, he co-founded City Lights along with Peter D. Martin, creating a home for books and authors that more traditional bookstores didn’t feature.
In 1955, Ferlinghetti launched City Lights Publishers, publishing his own collection “Pictures of the Gone World” as its first book.It wouldn’t be long before Ferlinghetti and City Lights created controversy as he published Ginsberg’s 1956 poem “Howl,” one of the great classics of Beat poetry.
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