20th century
A01=Gioia Woods
activism
AIDS
Allen Ginsberg
Anselm Hollo
Author_Gioia Woods
biography
bookstore
Category=DNB
Category=DNBL
Category=JBSL
Category=KNTP
censorship
City Lights Books
counterculture
Cuba
Elaine Katzenberger
environmental
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_business-finance-law
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eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Ernesto Cardenal
free expression
independent bookstore
Iron Curtain
Italian
Jacques Prevert
Journal for the Protection of All Beings
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lenore Kandel
literature
Nancy Peters
paperback
poetry
politics
protest
San Francisco
Thomas Merton
utopia
war
Product details
- ISBN 9781647792398
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 20 Jan 2026
- Publisher: University of Nevada Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
City Lights: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore is the seminal story of the bookstore, its press, and the inimitable Ferlinghetti.
Gioia Woods is professor of humanities and chair of the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of the Western Writers Series monograph Gary Paul Nabhan, coeditor of Western Subjects: Autobiographical Writing in the North American West, and editor of Left in the West: Literature, Culture, and Progressive Politics in the American West.
