Lawrence Ferlinghetti—poet, owner of San Francisco’s iconic City Lights bookstore, and muse and patron of the Beat movement—died Monday of a lung condition, according to his family. He was 101. A World War II veteran who commanded a submarine off the coast of Normandy on D-Day, Ferlinghetti moved to the Bay Area after the war, opening his bookstore in 1953. Three years later, he would publish Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” a cultural touchstone in the counter-cultural poetry movement—and, later on, the centerpiece of an obscenity trial, in which the court ultimately acquitted Ferlinghetti. “The first thing I realized, there was no bookstore to become the locus for the literary community,” Ferlinghetti told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2018. “It’s really important if you’re going to have a literary community, it has to have a locus.” He is survived by his two children, Julie and Lorenzo.
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