In 1953, a poet and a sociology instructor started a bookstore in San Francisco with just $1,000 and a handshake.
That shop — City Lights — would soon become one of the most iconic bookstores in the world. Founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti cemented its place at the epicenter of the Beat Generation and the store became a global beacon for free speech.
But the shop’s legacy is much larger than just Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
NAU professor and author Gioia Woods’ new book, “City Lights: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore,” recounts the 70-year history of the institution. She spoke with KNAU’s Bree Burkitt.
BREE BURKITT: The subtitle for the book refers to it as a biography of the bookstore. It's less about the founders or the famous writers who have passed through there over the years, but more about the actual institution itself. Why did you choose that approach?
GIOIA WOODS: Because the institution has a life. It’s not a museum trapped in the amber of history. It has a beating heart for the community — not just in San Francisco, but all over the world. I wanted to show that it’s an alive institution that deserves our protection and our patronage.
BURKITT: Right and it provided a platform for a lot of writers who might not have found that otherwise, things that were maybe a little subversive — a little unconventional —and, to an extent, a kind of a safe haven.
WOODS: Yeah, it was a safe haven and, in fact, Ferlinghetti sort of starts his whole reputation in 1956 by publishing Allen Ginsberg's poem, "Howl," which was immediately taken to court for being obscene.
And with the help of the ACLU in 1957, uh, Ferlinghetti fought off obscenity charges. And the Ninth Circuit Court judge, Judge [Clayton] Horn, said something about "Howl" that nourished Ferlinghetti his entire career — "The book is not obscene, but in fact, it reflects what's obscene in society at the time. It reflects the things that destroy the best parts of human nature.” And those parts of human nature that were being destroyed . . . were the joy, the spark, the creativity.
Judge Horn went on to say that "Howl" identifies conformity, materialism and the mechanization that leads to war as that which destroys human nature.
And those three things really motivated Ferlinghetti all his life. He wanted to, with his own poetry and with his own publishing and with his own institution, combat those things: materialism, conformity and mechanization.
BURKITT: We often see City Lights get reduced to one movement with a particular group of writers — a particular era. What is the disservice to it by reducing it to just that?
WOODS: If we reduce City Lights to just its sort of tangential connection with the Beats, we lose sight of all the other amazing movements that it supported. For example, in the 1970s, it published numerous books and collections of poetry on what was then called “the ecology.” It was a forefront in communicating about “the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Into the 1990s, it began publishing really keen observations on American intervention in Latin America.
And into the 2000s, it continues to publish on the issues that vex us today: police brutality, incarceration, the carceral system, environmental and climate crisis and LGBTQ+ rights… So every single decade, it has met the challenge of the decade. It's sort of like a cultural first responder.
BURKITT: Gioia, congrats on the book and thanks for speaking with us.
WOODS: Thanks, Bree.
“City Lights: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore” is out now.
