Autogeddon 36" x 92", 1998/99 re-painted in 2009

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The best known voice of the wide-open poetry movement that began in the 1950s, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has written poetry, translation, fiction, theater, art criticism, film narration, and essays. Often concerned with politics and social issues, he opposed the literary elite's definition of art and the artist's role in the world.

Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers in 1919. His father died six months before he was born, and his mother was committed to an asylum shortly after his birth. He was raised by his French aunt Emily. Ferlinghetti served in the U.S. Navy in World War II as a commander of a subchaser and gave backup for the Normandy invasion. He saw Nagasaki six weeks after its destruction by the atom bomb and became and instant pacifist.

He began painting in Paris in 1948, long before he started writing. His paintings have been shown at galleries around the world, from the Butler Museum of American Painting to Il Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. He has been associated with the international Fluxus movement.

In 1951 Ferlinghetti moved to San Francisco, taught French, painted, and wrote art criticism. In 1953, with Peter D. Martin, he founded City Lights Bookstore, and by 1955 the City Lights publishing house. City Lights Publishers began with the Pocket Poets Series, aimed to create an international, dissident ferment. Ferlinghetti's publication of Allen Ginsberg's Howl & Other Poems in 1956 led to his arrest on obscenity charges, and the trial that followed drew national attention to the San Francisco Renaissance and Beat movement writers.

Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) continues to be the most popular poetry book in the U.S. with nearly 1,000,000 copies in print. He was and remains a very prolific writer. Of his over 30 books a dozen are currently in print in the U.S., and his work has been translated in many languages. His most recent books are A Far Rockaway of the Heart (1997), How to Paint Sunlight (2001), Americus Book I (2004) and Poetry as Insurgent Art (2007).

Adapted from the City Lights web site.