Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Almost 100, Speaks With The Guardian About the Future

At The Guardian, Chloe Veltman speaks with City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti about the passage of time, his career, and his thoughts about the future on the eve of his 100th birthday. "His body might be failing him," Veltman writes. "But his mind is still on fire. He’s hoping for a revolution. Trouble is, he says, 'the United States isn’t ready for a revolution.'" From there: 

Ferlinghetti is turning 100 years old this Sunday. And the man knows a thing or two about revolutions. He helped start one himself, changing the face of literary culture in the United States when he co-founded City Lights bookshop in 1953 with a college professor friend, Peter Dean Martin.

Born in Yonkers, New York, in 1919, Ferlinghetti came to California in the early 1950s, drawn to the state as a place where people could start over. It was what he called this country’s last frontier.

Ferlinghetti’s mission for his new bookstore and publishing company was aligned with his left-leaning politics: to break literature out of its stuffy, academic cage, its self-centered focus on what he calls “the me me me”, and make it accessible to all.

It was a big risk.

“We were young and foolish,” he says. “And we had no money.”

Unlike most other bookstores around the country, which closed at 5pm on weekdays and were shuttered completely at the weekends, City Lights stayed open seven days a week and late into the night. Ferlinghetti wanted to create a sense of community, a place for people to toss around ideas.

Read more at The Guardian.