Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poet Who Nurtured the Beats, Dies at 101

I went to City Lights for the first and only time in early 2019.

I was in San Francisco for a work trip. The last time I had been in SF for vacation we didn’t make it to City Lights. We went to a couple of other bookstores instead (like the McSweeney’s pirate shop lol)but City Lights had seemed out of the way.

I don’t know why I didn’t go. I had done part of my work in American Studies on the Beats and Norman Mailer and those writers in the 50s. I was very much aware of City Lights and Howl and all of that. But I didn’t go.

So on this trip, even though it was for work, I was going to go. That it’s open until midnight made things easier. I looked at my hotel and mapped how far it was to City Lights.

It was only about a mile or 2, but I didn’t factor in the SF hills. I went anyway. And it was small, but the right size. The main floor has modern fiction, the bottom floor was non-fiction, and the top floor attic-type space was all about the Beats and City Lights.

I wasn’t a big of Ferlinghetti’s but I appreciate how he took care of the community and took care of artists he believed in.

No one had a bookstore that sold paperbacks (a new thing in the 50s). So he created one.