His parents were unable to care for him, however (sometimes Ferlinghetti said his father had died before his birth, sometimes after), and he was rescued by an aunt, Emily Monsanto, who took him to France for his first six years. He was born Lawrence Monsanto Ferling in Yonkers, New York, to a French mother, Albertine Mendes-Monsanto, and an Italian father, Carlo Ferlinghetti, an auctioneer, who had shortened the family name to Ferling.
Perhaps the facts made Ferlinghetti uncomfortable. Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading A Coney Island of the Mind and other poems at the University of California, Berkeley, 2005 For this, he was immortalised by his master in the poem Dog. The poet recalled that Homer Ferlinghetti received regular mail, but that his public relations career stalled when he peed against a policeman’s leg. For many years, he listed his dog, Homer, as City Lights’ “publicity and public relations officer. Different reference books give different dates of birth, and one published story had it that he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the place of the pissoir in French literature.
“If I had some biographical questionnaire to answer, I would always make something up,” he once said. City Lights, which he started in partnership with the magazine editor Peter Martin in the early 50s, is still among the most welcoming of shops, with its tables and chairs, sheaves of magazines, and signs saying: “Pick a book, sit down, and read”.įerlinghetti discouraged interviewers and seekers of personal information. In addition to a political commitment that blended anarchism and ecology – he loathed the motor car, calling it “ the infernal combustion engine” – he had an instinctive business sense, based on the principle of small is beautiful. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet, artist, activist and founder of San Francisco’s famous City Lights Bookstore, who has died aged 101 of interstitial lung disease, was the least “beat” of the Beat Generation.
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