Beat generation poet and editor Lawrence Ferlinghetti dies

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in 1998, in San Francisco, in front of his bookstore.REUTERS

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, popular adventurous poet and editor, who turned his legendary City Lights bookstore into a shuttle and lair for the Beat generation, has died at his home in San Francisco a month short of his 102nd birthday due to a lung condition.

In that labyrinthine bookstore at the gates of the North Beach neighborhood, which is still a must-see for readers around the world, as well as the headquarters of the small publishing house still active after more than 60 years, a Ferlinghetti's 100th birthday party.

Almost blind, the spiritual father of the Beat generation could no longer read and preferred not to go.

He wanted others to celebrate for him, although he had things to celebrate, such as the publication of a little autobiographical novel,

Little Boy,

about a boy who in the first line he describes as "quite lost."

• "We cannot be salon poets"

• The insurgency according to Ferlinghetti

• "A writer does not retire until he can hold the pen"

So was the Ferlinghetti child.

He was born in 1919, at the end of the First World War.

His father, an Italian immigrant who started a small real estate business, died shortly after he was born.

Before the little boy was two years old, his mother was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, and the future poet was raised by a distant aunt, went through an orphanage and then was taken in by a wealthy couple who saw potential in that child.

A Dickensian childhood that contributed to his adult tendency to come out in defense of losers.

Raised in New York, he was curiously unrelated to what would become the great

East Coast

beat

writers

until he crossed the country in 1951 and opened City Lights in San Francisco.

That bookstore became a magnet for writers.

Older than them and a supporter of a less crazy lifestyle, Ferlinghetti nonetheless accompanied, published and defended the great

beat

poets

.

He set up a small publishing house in which in 1956 he brought out

Howl,

Allen Ginsberg's

hallucinogenic anti-

establishment

manifesto

, which became a bible into counterculture verse.

In 1957, mainly due to the scenes of homosexual imagery in the book, the publisher was arrested, accused of printing "indecent writings".

After a long and media trial, he was acquitted.

The world discovered Ginsberg and the Beat generation.

The legend of Ferlinghetti was born.

A defender of the freer margins of creativity and allergic to the prevailing Puritan conservatism, the fight against censorship was one of Ferlinghetti's two great achievements.

Another was the start of a revolution in independent publishing.

Created from scratch, the message from City Lights to radical and innovative writers was that they did not have to worry if the big New York publishers ignored them.

He also left an important work as an author.

Although critics did not consider him on par with his friends the great

beat

writers

, such as Kerouac, Corso or Ginsberg himself, he wrote dozens of books.

Highlights

A Coney Island of the Mind

(1958), one of the most successful books of

poetry in American literature, which has sold over a million copies.

Directly spoken, written to be recited with jazz accompaniment, the book was a milestone in poetry's journey to the street.

An irony critic of American culture, in his verses he compares the disasters of Goya's war with the scenes of the Second World War in the United States: “We are the same people / only further from home / on fifty-lane highways / on a concrete continent / strewn with insipid posters / illustrating foolish illusions of happiness ”.

Time has made

Coney Island of the mind

not only a title of great cultural significance, but a classic of modern poetry.

As a child, the aunt who was left in his care moved with him to Strasbourg, where he learned French before English.

Back in the United States, life was not easy for both of them, until she found a job as a governess at the home of Presley and Anna Bisland in Bronxville, New York.

They assumed the education of little Lawrence, who devoured the books in the family library.

He combined his taste for epic poetry with the prose of the streets, which led to small episodes of juvenile delinquency that destroyed his bones in a strict Massachusetts boarding school.

That certain feeling of abandonment influenced his literary tastes.

He graduated from journalism and fought in World War II aboard a submarine fighter across the North Atlantic.

Before moving to San Francisco, he graduated from Columbia with a literature degree and attended the Sorbonne like so many postwar bohemians.

"If anything, I was more the last of the bohemians than the first of the

beat," he

said in an interview in

The Guardian

in 2006. "But somehow, what I really did was take care of my store."