Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in 1919 in Yonkers, New York. He was always very evasive about his past, but it is believed that his father died before he was born and his mother was committed to a mental hospital shortly after his birth. He was raised by an aunt, who took him to France for six years. Upon returning to the United States the aunt abandoned him, and Ferlinghetti was raised by a foster family. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he earned a BA in journalism in 1941. He served in the US Navy during World War II[1] as the captain of a submarine chaser. After the war Ferlinghetti studied at the Sorbonne in Paris where he met his future wife, Selden Kirby-Smith. Ferlinghetti earned a Masters in English Literature in 1947 from Columbia, and a PhD from the University of Paris in 1951. He and Kirby-Smith would marry and move to San Francisco that same year, where Ferlinghetti made a living as a poet and painter. He and Kirby-Smith would have two children before divorcing in 1976.
One evening in 1953, returning home from his painting studio on Mission, Ferlinghetti saw a man, Peter D Martin, hanging a sign in front of a newly opened bookstore. The two men became friends, and Ferlinghetti ultimately became Martin’s business partner. Peter D Martin had moved from New York to San Francisco in the 1940s to teach sociology at San Francisco State University[2]. He created a pop culture magazine in July 1952 called City Lights after a popular Charlie Chaplin film. He rented a small office at 261 Columbus above a flower shop in North Beach. The building had been built in 1907 over the ruins of a previous building that was destroyed in the 1906 Earthquake and Fires[3]. When the flower shop closed, Martin decided to open a bookstore to support the magazine and pay the rent. He came up with the idea of having an all-paperback book store – the first in the nation (up to that point, paperbacks were sold on spinning racks in drugstores and bus stations). As mentioned, Martin and Ferlinghetti opened the book store, City Lights Booksellers[4], together in 1953. Ferlinghetti managed the store while Martin continued to work on his magazine. Only a year later, Martin decided to move back to New York, selling his share of the bookstore to Ferlinghetti.
In 1955 Ferlinghetti launched City Lights Publishers with a Pocket Poets Series, the first publication being a collection of his own poetry entitled Pictures of the Gone World. He hired Shigeyoshi “Shig” Murao to manage the bookstore while Ferlinghetti ran City Lights Publishing in the basement, previously used to store ChinaTown’s ceremonial dragon. This basement became the hangout for artists like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
In 1956 City Lights published Ginsberg’s poem Howl, leading to the arrest of Ferlinghetti and Murao six months later for selling obscene material. Their trial became a leading case for First Amendment rights and, when both men were acquitted, it launched a revolution of “wide-open” literature. City Lights Booksellers, and several North Beach bars like Vesuvio[5] and Cafe Trieste[6], became the epicenter of the Beat Movement: a group of poets and authors who explored American culture and politics in the post-World War II era while pushing the boundaries of acceptable literature. Ironically, while Ferlinghetti is identified as a leader in the Beat Movement, he never saw himself as a Beat poet, merely a publisher of Beat poetry.
In January 1967 Ferlinghetti was a key presenter at the Human Be-In[7], which drew thousands of youth to San Francisco and launched the City’s Summer of Love. Shig Murao would be replaced as manager of City Lights Booksellers by Joseph Wolberg, who is credited for organizing the book collection. In 1971 Wolberg was replaced by Nancy Peters, who became co-owner of the bookstore in 1984. In 2000 Ferlinghetti and Peters were able to purchase the City Lights building. It was retrofitted and restored to its original appearance, and gained City landmark status the following year.
Ferlinghetti died on February 23, 2021 of lung disease at the age of 101. Today, City Lights Booksellers and City Lights Publishing is spread across all three floors of the building. It includes new-release hardcovers and quality paperbacks from all the major publishing houses. City Lights Publishing has over 200 titles in print, with about a dozen new titles published each year.
[1] World War II: https://thesanfranciscophoenix.com/?p=4222
[2] San Francisco State University: story coming July 18th
[3] 1906 Earthquake and Fires: https://thesanfranciscophoenix.com/?p=2849
[4] Visit them at www.citylights.com
[5] Vesuvio: https://thesanfranciscophoenix.com/?p=5026
[6] Cafe Trieste: https://thesanfranciscophoenix.com/?p=5560
[7] Human Be-In: story coming January 14th
