An unapologetic proponent of “poetry as insurgent art,” he was also a publisher and the owner of the celebrated San Francisco bookstore City Lights.

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 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.

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.

“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?

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.

In 1951, he went west to San Francisco.

“I see San Francisco from my window through some old Navy beer bottles.

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.

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.

Of course, these are all free books we gave the poets.” “It’s already too late?

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] “Peace in San Francisco.

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?

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.

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.

Ferlinghetti befriended, published and championed many of the major Beat poets, among them Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Michael McClure.

Ferlinghetti should be regarded as a Beat poet.

“When I arrived in San Francisco in 1951 I was wearing a beret.

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.”.

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.

Left in their care, Lawrence bloomed.

Among his favorite books was Thomas Wolfe’s coming-of-age novel “Look Homeward, Angel”; Mr.

Ferlinghetti went west in early 1951, landing in San Francisco with a sea bag and little else.

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.

Each man put in $500, and City Lights opened.

Ferlinghetti, by then the sole owner of City Lights, started publishing poems, including his own.

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

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

Ferlinghetti spoke to both the city he loved and the changes he’d seen:

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.”

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

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

Its chief executive, Elaine Katzenberger, told Publishers Weekly that the money gave City Lights the ability to plan for the future