City Lights

Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore

Gioia Woods

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN:
  9781647792404
• Print ISBN:
  9781647792398
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies

On a San Francisco street corner in 1953, aspiring painter and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti shook hands with sociology instructor and magazine editor Peter Martin. Their handshake sealed Ferlinghetti's five-hundred-dollar investment in a small retail space above a North Beach flower shop that would become City Lights Bookstore and Press. Since the mid-twentieth century, the bookstore and its press have continued to shape the way literature is produced and consumed. As the first-ever all-paperback bookstore in the nation, sponsor of the Beat Movement and the San Francisco Renaissance, home of the Pocket Poets series, torchbearer for free speech movements, and promoter of global comparative literature and human rights, City Lights has continuously been at the avant-garde of literary experimentation and cultural revolution. 

City Lights: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore is the seminal story of the bookstore, its press, and the inimitable Ferlinghetti. 
 

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Books
• Chapter One. The Dissident Romantic
• Chapter Two. Building Utopia
• Chapter Three. Free Expression
• Chapter Four. “An International, Dissident, Insurgent Ferment”
• Chapter Five. War, Environment, and the Search for Meaningful Protest
• Chapter Six. Radical Equality and the Business of the Book
• Chapter Seven. Queer Expression, Revolutionary Politics
• Chapter Eight. Creating a World to Share
• Acknowledgments
• Credits
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author