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Lawrence Ferlinghetti United States of America    PWF 1998

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in 1919 in Yonkers, New York. He grew up in France with a relative after his mother was sent to an insane asylum when he was very young. He returned and eventually attended the University of North Carolina, after which he joined the Navy. He went on to teach French and make the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, the first all-paperback bookstore in the United States.  Visibly “in the American grain”, he remains pre-eminent in American letters as poet, translator, publisher, playwright and patron saint. His humanistic radical writing is seen as an important predecessor to the Beat Generation.

In 1958, A Coney Island of the Mind brought nationwide recognition and immense sales. The poem collection provides a broad landscape for Ferlinghetti’s major themes: “anarchy, mass corruption, engagement, and a belief in the surreality and wonder of life.”  In 1998, he was named San Francisco’s Poet Laureate.

His many awards and accolades include the Robert Frost Memorial Medal, the Author’s Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2003. He also received the Literarian Award of the National Book Foundation in 2005, the Author’s Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, and the title of Commandeur in the French of Order of Arts and Letters.

Ferlinghetti last released a 50th Anniversary edition of A Coney Island of the Mind in 2008 and Time of Useful Consciousness in 2012.