Yesterday was the one-hundredth
birthday of Lawrence Ferlinghetti: WWII veteran; co-founder of City
Lights, one of the nation’s great independent bookstores; publisher of
iconic beat poetry, including Allen Ginsburg’s Howl, for which
he was arrested; self-described philosophical anarchist; and inaugural
poet laureate of San Francisco. As Robert Pinsky wrote recently the New York Times, “Ferlinghetti has not just survived for a century: He epitomizes the American culture of that century.”
The indomitable San Franciscan trailblazer has been writing,
publishing, running vibrant literary salons, and rattling cages for over
sixty-five years, and just last week, as a “literary last will and
testament,” he released Little Boy—a
wild, sweeping work of semi-autobiographical fiction, “part
autobiography, part summing up, part Beat-inflected torrent of language
and feeling, and all magical.”
To mark this most monumental of birthdays, we thought we’d go right
back to where it all began and revisit the reviews of Ferlinghetti’s
seminal, million-selling 1958 debut collection, A Coney Island of the Mind.
Happy Birthday, Lawrence!
... [mehr] https://bookmarks.reviews/revisiting-lawrence-ferlinghettis-a-coney-island-of-the-mind/
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