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Lawrence Ferlinghetti, literary citadel of San Francisco, dies at 101

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, an acclaimed poet and longtime proprietor of City Lights, the San Francisco bookstore and avant-garde publishing house that catapulted the Beat Generation to fame and helped establish the city as a center of literary and cultural Revolution , died Feb. 22 at his home in San Francisco. He was 101.

The cause was interstitial lung disease, said his son, Lorenzo.

Intensely private and fiercely political, Mr. Ferlinghetti became a household name in the 1950s when he stood trial on obscenity charges for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s hallucinatory anti-establishment manifesto “Howl.”

The trial brought attention from around the world for Ginsberg, his ecstatically irreverent poem and, by extension, the entire Beat Generation — a roving band of hipsters, poets and artists who rebelled against the country’s conservatism, experimenting with literary forms as well as with drugs, sex and spirituality.

The “Howl” episode also cast Mr. Ferlinghetti as a heroic defender of free speech and a stalwart friend of the creative fringe. In the resulting glare, City Lights became one of San Francisco’s most enduring institutions — at once a source for edge-of-mainstream books, a gathering place for the city’s wandering artists and a pilgrimage site for anarchists, radicals and liberal activists.

When not tending shop, Mr. Ferlinghetti retreated to the attic of an old Victorian house, where he had a typewriter and an expansive view of the city. He wrote dozens of books, including one of the best-selling poetry volumes in American history: “A Coney Island of the Mind” (1958), a plain-spoken, often wry critique of American culture.

Written to be performed aloud with a jazz accompaniment, “Coney Island” helped yank poetry out of the academy into the streets.

“Christ climbed down/from His bare tree/this year,” reads one poem, “and ran away to where/no intrepid Bible salesmen/covered the territory/in two-tone Cadillacs.”

His own writing aside, Mr. Ferlinghetti was more widely known as a fixture at the center of the whirling counterculture that helped shape the nation’s social landscape since the 1950s. He was the bearded guru of San Francisco’s art scene, as closely identified with the city as summer fog and the Golden Gate.

Rest in peace.