Lawrence Ferlinghetti
March 24, 1919 - February 22, 2021
101 years old
From his City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, Ferlinghetti became a nexus for the American Beat Generation of the 1950s, publishing their work, offering his bookstore as a meeting place and support center, and participating in the courtroom fight against prohibited and unconventional books and ideas in the name of Civil Liberties and Free Speech. He was much like Sylvia Beach and her Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris for the Lost Generation writers there. Ferlinghetti himself was not a Beat. He was more like the adult in the room - older than the likes of Allen Ginsberg and his friends. But Ferlinghetti was a true Bohemian: an intellectual, writer and poet, a traveller, a man of eclectic talents and interests. Many young people today, raised with digital devices, have no idea what we had in Ferlinghetti, because they lack a proper understanding of print books and the space they occupy both psychologically and physically. In fact, not only young people, but most people overall. The physicality of books and the three-dimensional space they occupy are significant.
His name is famous within the literary community, but not so much outside of it. I knew who he was, though.