

Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 2012 at Caffe Triesteįerlinghetti penned much of his early poetry in the vein of T. He was arrested for publishing Allen Ginsberg's Howl, resulting in a First Amendment trial in 1957, where Ferlinghetti was charged with publishing an obscene work-and acquitted. The first series he published was the Pocket Poets Series. In 1955 Ferlinghetti bought Martin's share and established a publishing house with the same name. Martin, a student at San Francisco State University.

He moved to San Francisco in 1951 and founded City Lights in North Beach in 1953, in partnership with Peter D. They were both heading to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. įerlinghetti met his wife-to-be, Selden Kirby-Smith, the granddaughter of Edmund Kirby-Smith, in 1946 aboard a ship en route to France. in comparative literature with a dissertation on Paris as a symbol in modern poetry. From Columbia, he went to the University of Paris and earned a Ph.D. degree in English literature from Columbia University with a thesis on John Ruskin and the British painter J. Navy throughout World War II, as the captain of a submarine chaser in the Normandy invasion. He began his journalism career by writing sports for The Daily Tar Heel, and published his first short stories in Carolina Magazine, for which Thomas Wolfe had written. He attended the Mount Hermon School for Boys (later Northfield Mount Hermon) graduating in 1937, then the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned a B.A. He was raised by an aunt, and later by foster parents. Shortly before his birth, his father, Carlo, a native of Brescia, died of a heart attack and his mother, Clemence Albertine (née Mendes-Monsanto), of Portuguese Sephardic Jewish descent, was committed to a mental hospital shortly after. Early life įerlinghetti was born on March 24, 1919, in Yonkers, New York.


When Ferlinghetti turned 100 in March 2019, the city of San Francisco turned his birthday, March 24, into "Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day". An author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, Ferlinghetti was best known for his second collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), which has been translated into nine languages and sold over a million copies. Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti (Ma– February 22, 2021) was an American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers.
