City Lights is the historic bookshop that symbolises the Beat Generation and alternative American culture. A gem of San Francisco founded by 98-year-old poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
The historic independent bookshop and publishing house City Lights has been the gathering point for the writers who represented the "Beat Generation" — a movement of youthful rebellion that developed in the United States during the 1950s — giving it a voice by spreading its alternative social and political thinking through the publication of books. Founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin, an academic and bookseller, City Lights was a meeting place for the alternative counter-culture of the 1950s and 1960s and a launching pad for the spread of Beat thought, becoming a symbol of alternative culture.
Poet, publisher, political activist: the figure of Ferlinghetti — of Italian origin, today 98 years old and possessed of the same combative, alternative spirit as ever — has become the stuff of legend. For fifty years his bookshop has been a gathering place for writers, artists and intellectuals, and a spontaneous meeting point for political protest, as happened in the 1960s with the movement against the Vietnam War. He has always championed progressive and innovative ideas with unflagging commitment, openly opposing conservative and censorious forces, and taking clear, democratic political stances.
With the Pocket Poets series of booklets, and the publication and distribution of officially censored and banned books, Ferlinghetti often went far beyond the role of the conventional publisher, taking maverick positions and paying for them personally. For example, the publication of Howl & Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg in 1956 led to his arrest on charges of obscenity. While the days are gone when Columbus Avenue, in the Italian neighbourhood of North Beach opposite City Lights, would see busloads of tourists on pilgrimage in search of some surviving "beatnik" — a term denoting a young person who took part in the Beat Generation — from the 1950s and 1960s, City Lights keeps the legacy of that era alive. Its commitment against authoritarianism and in defence of social rights and alternative political thought remains clearly visible in the selection of titles it publishes.
The principal themes of the Beat Generation, which exerted a powerful influence on the transformation of American society, were the rejection of the norms imposed by society and its materialism, and experimentation with drugs, sexuality, and an interest in philosophies and religions such as those of the East. From an artistic and literary standpoint, opposition to the system translated into explicit and raw depictions of the human condition and of reality, above all through the work of writers and poets defined as "alternative," such as Jack Kerouac, Lucien Carr, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Neal Cassady, Gary Snyder, Norman Mailer and Lawrence Ferlinghetti himself.
The cultural movements known as "May 1968" are also considered part of the Beat Generation. These include the opposition to the Vietnam War and the hippies, the student revolt that began at the University of Berkeley and culminated in 1969 with the Woodstock festival in Bethel, near New York — an immense three-day celebration of peace and rock music attended by more than 400,000 young people, demonstrating the consolidation of a transformation in American society's thinking and customs.
City Lights' collaboration with SF print collective, a collective of printers who use graphic media, posters, murals and banners to support social justice movements, communities and organisations, has over the years given rise to a series of banners on the façade of the bookshop building, designed to stimulate dialogue and reflection on social issues, fuelling debate and dissent. Messages such as "Stop war and war makers" and "Dissent is not unamerican" show that the spirit of City Lights is alive and its soul has never changed. The Poetry Room, the poetry space on the first floor of the bookshop where the packed readings by Beat poets and writers used to take place, is a fascinating place that does not live solely on memories of the past but remains part of the city's intellectual scene. A space always open to new ideas and to giving room to young writers — and where you can discover books that are impossible to find anywhere else.