![]() ![]() “We intend to build on Ferlinghetti’s vision and honor his memory by sustaining City Lights into the future as a center for open intellectual inquiry and commitment to literary culture and progressive politics,” City Lights said in a statement. ![]() The cause was interstitial lung disease, his son told the Associated Press. The poet, publisher and bookseller, who at 101 outlived most of the major figures of the literary movement he promoted, died Monday evening, according to Starr Sutherland, a friend who is working on a documentary about City Lights. “I was,” he once said, “sort of the guy tending the store.” Nor did he seem to mind that the critical attention heaped on his celebrated friends mostly eluded him, even though he was a prolific poet with more than 30 collections published over half a century. ![]() Tall and lean, he swam daily and biked to work at City Lights, the San Francisco bookshop that became a landmark of intellectual freedom not long after he co-founded it seven decades ago. Unlike Beat novelist Jack Kerouac and poet Allen Ginsberg, he was known for neither public drunkenness nor public nudity. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was the opposite of the flamboyant literary bad boys drawn to the bohemian haven he nurtured in 1950s San Francisco. ![]()
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