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Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet, publisher, painter, social activist and bookstore owner, has been San Francisco's honored poet. He turns 100 this month, and the city is making preparations to celebrate him in style. Readings and performances and an open house will take place at City Lights, the sacred bookstore he cofounded in 1953.
On March 24, 1919, Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York. After spending his early childhood in France, he received his BA from the University of North Carolina, an MA from Columbia University, and a PhD from the Sorbonne.
He is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, including Poetry as Insurgent Art; A Coney Island of the Mind. He has translated the works of a number of poets, including Nicanor Parra, Jacques Prevert, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. In addition to poetry, he is also the author of more than eight plays and three novels, including Little Boy: A Novel, Love in the Days of Rage and Her.
In 1953, Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin opened the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, California. It became a nerve center for the Beats and other writers. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and other writers from that era were Easterners who dropped into San Francisco for a spell. In 2001 it was made an official historic landmark. Now City Lights is almost certainly the best bookstore in the United States. It's filled with serious world literature of all kinds.
If City Lights is a San Francisco institution, Ferlinghetti himself is as much of one. He has loomed over the city's literary life. As a poet, he's never been a critical favorite. But his flexible and plainspoken and often powerful work—he has published more than 50 volumes—has found a wide audience. His collection "A Coney Island of the Mind” has sold more than 1 million copies, making it one of the bestselling American poetry books ever published.