Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Biography

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–), the famous beat poet, has long identified as a philosophical anarchist and a pacifist—it was only two weeks after Nagasaki was bombed that he, as an American solider, visited the ruins. In the ‘50s he started the City Lights bookstore and publishing company in San Francisco, where he published Ginsberg’s Howl and was therefore arrested and charged with obscenity. With the help of the ACLU, he won and set a legal landmark for other publishers of sex and drug literature. In addition to his poetry, he wrote two novels: Her (1960), a surreal and semi-autobiographical novel, and Love in the Days of Rage (1988), about a bourgeois anarchist caught up in the May ‘68 uprisings in Paris.

Taken from: Mythmakers & Lawbreakers : Anarchist Writers on Fiction

Biography from the Poetry Foundation