Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The title of this book is taken from Henry Miller's Into the Night Life and expresses the way Lawrence Ferlinghetti felt about these poems when he wrote them during a short period in the 1950s— as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul.

Just in time for his 98th birthday, New Directions is proud to present a swift, terrific chronological selection of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's greatest poems. Through this tight lens, it is now possible to see Ferlinghetti—a brilliant and prolific poet—in a richer, broader, and more complex way. From his very first landmark books—Pictures from the Gone World (City Lights, 1955) and A...

Lawrence Ferlinghetti has influenced American culture like few other poets. But in 1955, shortly before he would gain fame as the beloved author of A Coney Island of the Mind, he was an unpublished and mostly unknown poet. He launched City Lights Publishers that year with a five-hundred-copy letterpress edition of Pictures of the Gone World, Number One in the...