In 1956, Ferlinghetti published the first edition of Allen Ginsberg's Howl. According to one critic, his greatest accomplishments were fighting censorship and starting a small-press revolution.

Transcript

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Lawrence Ferlinghetti has died. He is probably best known for his beat poetry, his San Francisco bookstore and small press City Lights and his defense of the First Amendment. The poet, publisher and bookseller was 101. Tom Vitale has this appreciation.

TOM VITALE, BYLINE: Lawrence Ferlinghetti's most famous work is a 1958 collection of poetry called "A Coney Island Of The Mind." In it, he compares the horrors depicted in Goya's paintings of the Napoleonic Wars to scenes of post-World War II America.

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LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: (Reading) They are the same people, only further from home, on freeways 50 lanes wide, on a concrete continent spaced with bland billboards, illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness.

VITALE: "A Coney Island Of The Mind" was translated into nine languages and sold more than a million copies. Despite his popularity, Ferlinghetti was never considered on a par with some of the other beat writers he called his friends - Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg. Even though Ferlinghetti was raised in New York, he told me in 1994, he never met those East Coast writers until he moved to San Francisco and opened City Lights.

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FERLINGHETTI: Bookstore is a natural place for poets to hang out, and they started showing up there right from the beginning. And so Ginsberg and Corso, Kerouac later - they came through. I think most of them were coming from Mexico.

VITALE: City Lights became a magnet for West Coast intellectuals and later a tourist destination. Ferlinghetti also started a small press called City Lights Books. In the fall of 1956, he published a little 75-cent paperback, the first edition of "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Reading) I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked, dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.

VITALE: "Howl" was a new type of poetry that gave voice to an undercurrent of dissatisfaction in Eisenhower's America. It became an anthem for the nascent counterculture.

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FERLINGHETTI: Before Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," the state of poetry in America was a little bit the way it is today - poetry about poetry. So when "Howl" - "Howl" knocked the sides out of things, just the way rock music in the '60s knocked the sides out of the old music world.

VITALE: "Howl" included passages of sexual imagery, and Ferlinghetti was arrested in 1957 on charges of publishing obscene material. At the end of a long federal trial, the poem was found to have redeeming social importance and therefore not obscene. Literary critic Gerald Nicosia says Ferlinghetti's two greatest accomplishments were fighting censorship and inaugurating a small-press revolution.

GERALD NICOSIA: Up until that point, getting published was a difficult thing. If you were a radical and innovative writer, you would be rebuffed by New York, by mainstream publishers. By creating this press out of nothing, City Lights Press, he said, look; you don't need these big publishers in New York. You can do it, and you can get the books out, and you can - and not only that, you can - you know, you can make waves.

VITALE: Lawrence Ferlinghetti was always an advocate for the underdog, in part because of his own life story. He was born on March 24, 1919, in Yonkers. His father died shortly before he was born, and his mother was committed to an insane asylum shortly after. He was raised by an aunt and then foster parents. Ferlinghetti enlisted in the Navy after Pearl Harbor. He served as an officer at Normandy on D-Day and at Nagasaki after the atomic bomb. That experience turned him into a lifelong pacifist. After the war, he got a master's degree at Columbia University and a doctorate at the Sorbonne. He began writing poetry about America in the 1950s.

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FERLINGHETTI: (Reading) And all the final hollering monsters of the imagination, of disaster, they are so bloody real. It is as if they really still existed, and they do.

VITALE: Ferlinghetti began his career at a revolutionary time in arts and music. In 1994, he still believed art could make a difference.

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FERLINGHETTI: I really believe that art is capable of the total transformation of the world and of life itself.

VITALE: For NPR News, I'm Tom Vitale in New York.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.