Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers in 1919; his father died before his birth, and his mother was committed to an institution soon after. An aunt took him to France, to Strasbourg, then he passed through an orphanage in New York State. During the war, he commanded a submarine chaser at the Normandy landings and saw Nagasaki a few weeks after the bomb. In 1953 he opened a paperback bookshop in San Francisco, then in 1955 a publishing house that an obscenity trial made famous in 1957. The first poet laureate of his city, he died there in 2021, aged one hundred and one.

In the catalogue 1

• PoetryA Coney Island of the MindLawrence Ferlinghetti · 1958Literature