Lawrence Ferlinghetti, San Francisco Bookseller and Patron of the Beat Poets, Dies at 101

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.