1919
March 24 Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti born in Yonkers, New York.
1925–1937
Orphaned and abandoned by his aunt, Emily Monsanto, Ferlinghetti is adopted by Presley and Anna Bisland, a wealthy couple living in an exclusive neighborhood in Bronxville, NY. Presley encouraged him to read, educated him in the ancient classics, and placed him in a series of private and public schools. When young Ferlinghetti is arrested for shoplifting as part of his gang of “Parkway Road Pirates,” he is sent to Mount Hermon, a private boy’s high school on a farm near Greenfield, MA, where he received an excellent education while learning self-discipline. On his 16th birthday, Ferlinghetti receives a gift from the Bislands of his first book of poetry, a French-English edition of Baudelaire poems. It inspired him to begin writing poems himself.
1941
Ferlinghetti graduates from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill with a B.A. in Journalism. During college he was the circulation manager of The Daily Tar Heel, the campus newspaper.
1942–1944
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Ferlinghetti attended midshipmen’s school in Chicago and shipped out as ensign on J. P. Morgan III’s yacht, retrofitted for submarine patrol off the East Coast. As commander of the submarine chaser USS SC1308, he screened the beaches during the Normandy invasion on D-Day. After VE Day, he was transferred to the Pacific Theater, where he was navigator of the troop ship USS Selinur. Thereafter, he became a life-long pacifist after visiting the ruins of atom-bombed Nagasaki.
1947–1951
Enrolled under the G.I. Bill, Ferlinghetti graduates in 1947 from Columbia University with a master’s degree in English literature. His thesis focused on John Ruskin and the British painter J. M. W. Turner.
Continuing his studies in Paris at the Sorbonne from 1948–1951, Ferlinghetti earns a Doctorat de l’Université de Paris (“mention très honorable”) with a dissertation on the city as a symbol in modern poetry.
Returning to Bronxville in the summer of 1949 to visit “Mother Bisland” after the death of her husband, Ferlinghetti meets his future wife, Selden Kirby-Smith, aboard a ship en route to France in September. “Kirby,” as she was called, was on her way to the Sorbonne to study courses on French civilization. After hemming and hawing, Ferlinghetti proposes to Kirby in the summer of 1950.
1951
January 5 Ferlinghetti first arrives in Oakland, CA, and settles in San Francisco. He teaches French in an adult education program, paints, and writes art criticism.
April 10 Marries Kirby in Jacksonville, Florida.
July Publishes his first book review—an analysis of six recent collections of poetry—in the San Francisco Chronicle. Thereafter, he becomes a regular contributor of book reviews.
October Ferlinghetti first meets noted literary figure and cultural critic Kenneth Rexroth at one of his soirées. Rexroth’s beliefs in philosophical anarchism influenced Ferlinghetti’s political development. In time, Rexroth became one of Ferlinghetti’s most steadfast supporters.
1952
September Inferno, a well-respected San Francisco literary magazine with a radical bent, publishes Ferlinghetti’s translations of eight surrealistic poems by Jacques Prévert, along with the first of his own poems to be published, an early verse titled “Brother, Brother.” More of his Prévert translations appear the next year in the prestigious Contact and California Quarterly magazines.
1953
After the Ferlinghettis moved to an apartment at 339 Chestnut Street, Lawrence begins writing the “painter” poems that eventually constituted the core of his first collection of poems, Pictures of the Gone World.
Spring The popular culture magazine City Lights, published by Peter D. Martin, features six of Ferlinghetti’s translations of Prévert poems.
June Ferlinghetti and Martin launched City Lights Pocket Book Shop, America’s first all-paperback bookstore.
1954
Winter Allen Ginsberg introduces himself to Ferlinghetti at City Lights Pocket Books. Although Ferlinghetti is not interested in publishing Ginsberg’s first collection of poems, Empty Mirror, the two strike up a friendship based on common interests in literature and politics.
1955
January When Peter Martin returns to the East Coast, Ferlinghetti becomes the sole proprietor of City Lights Pocket Book Shop.
August 10 Ferlinghetti inaugurates the publishing arm of City Lights with his own first book of poems, Pictures of the Gone World, issued as “Pocket Poet Number One.”
August Working in his cottage at 1010 Montgomery Street, Allen Ginsberg composes the first part of “Howl.”
October 7 At the 6 Gallery, 3119 Fillmore Street, Ginsberg gives his first public reading of Part I of “Howl.”
October 8 Lawrence Ferlinghetti sends Ginsberg a telegram congratulating him on “Howl”—“I greet you at the beginning of a great literary career”—and offers to publish the manuscript.
1956
March 18 Ginsberg gives the first reading of the completed text of “Howl” at the Town Hall Theater in Berkeley, California.
March Ferlinghetti prevails on the ACLU to defend him if he is prosecuted for publishing Howl and Other Poems.
November 1 Official publication date for Howl and Other Poems. With a first printing of 1,500 copies, the book is the fourth number in the City Lights Pocket Poet Series.
December KPFA-FM in Berkeley broadcasts, during a 10:30 p.m. program, a recorded tape of Ginsberg reading “Howl.”
1957
March 25 Chester MacPhee, the San Francisco Collector of Customs, seizes 520 copies of the second printing of Howl and Other Poems on the basis of obscenity. An additional 1,000 copies go through Customs without detection.
April 3 The ACLU informs MacPhee that it will challenge the seizure of the book and the charge of obscenity.
May To avoid further seizures by Customs, Ferlinghetti arranges for 2,500 copies of Howl to be printed within the United States.
May 29 Customs releases the copies of Howl after the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco refuses to initiate condemnation proceedings.
June 3 After selling a copy of Howl to two local undercover police officers, Russell Woods and Thomas Pagee, the bookstore manager Shigeyoshi Murao is arrested. Subsequently, a warrant is issued for the arrest of Ferlinghetti by Captain William A. Hanrahan of the San Francisco Police Department’s Juvenile Bureau.
June 6 Returning from Big Sur, Ferlinghetti turns himself in to the police and is released after the ACLU posts $500 bail.
June 12 “Howl” is rebroadcast at 9:30 pm on KPFA-FM, though some words were deleted “simply as a matter of taste.”
August 8 Trial in People v. Ferlinghetti and Murao is scheduled to begin at the Municipal Court of the City and County of San Francisco, at 750 Kearny Street, with Judge Byron Arnold presiding. Ferlinghetti is defended by Jake Ehrlich and the ACLU lawyers Lawrence Speiser and Albert Bendich.
August 16 Trial by jury is waived and the case is transferred to the court of Judge Clayton W. Horn, a Sunday school teacher who once sentenced five female shoplifters to watch The Ten Commandments movie and to write essays on its moral lessons.
August 22 Charges against Shigeyoshi Murao are dismissed, since the prosecution could not prove that he had read the publication.
September 5 Nine defense witnesses testify as to the literary, artistic, political, and social merits of Howl. Beyond the police witnesses, the prosecution relies on two expert witnesses.
September 19 Closing arguments are given in the trial.
October 3 Judge Horn renders his opinion and verdict. Ferlinghetti is found not guilty of publishing and selling obscene writings, on the basis that Howl was not without redeeming social importance. The landmark First Amendment case established a key legal precedent for publication of other controversial literary works.
October With increased public interest in Howl, a fourth printing of 5,000 copies is ordered.
1958
A Coney Island of the Mind, Ferlinghetti’s most famous book of poetry, is released. With more than a million copies sold and translated in more than a dozen languages, it became over the years one of the best-selling modern poetry collections.
1962
Jack Kerouac’s autobiographical novel, Big Sur, characterizes Ferlinghetti as the amiable and generous Lorenzo Monsanto, whose coastal cabin is the site of Dionysian revelries for Kerouac and his Beat friends.
1971
October 30 KPFA-FM declares “Allen Ginsberg Day” with 15 hours of programming featuring Ginsberg’s complete works as read by him.
1986
May 13 Ginsberg writes a letter to Ferlinghetti informing him that the “Annotated Howl” will be dedicated to him.
1987
February 18 Ferlinghetti writes to Ginsberg to thank him for the dedication of “Annotated Howl”—“You’ve done it all as no one else could.”
April 16 The Federal Communications Commission rules that radio and television stations risk penalty if they broadcast indecent material. Eventually, the FCC permits such material to be broadcast only between midnight and 6 a.m.
1988
January 6 Although “Howl” was to be broadcast on several radio stations as part of a series on censorship called Open Ears / Open Minds, five Pacifica stations choose not to air the poem fearing FCC fines.
1990
April 18 At a meeting of the Federal Communications Bar Association, Ginsberg delivers a speech, “Statement on Censorship,” complaining about the FCC’s indecency regulation as applied to “Howl.”
1994
While lawyers challenged FCC indecency regulations in a District of Columbia federal courts of appeals, Ginsberg reads “Howl” aloud outside on the sidewalk.
San Francisco names an alley—Via Ferlinghetti—after the poet-publisher.
1997
April 5 Allen Ginsberg dies of liver cancer at 70 years of age.
April 7 New York Times publishes a front-page 2,915-word obituary of Ginsberg, replete with several photographs.
1998
Ferlinghetti is inaugurated as Poet Laureate of San Francisco. In his public address, he urges San Franciscans to vote to remove the earthquake-damaged Central Freeway and replace it with a boulevard, decrying automobiles for destroying “the poetry of a city.”
2001
City Lights Bookstore is declared an official historical landmark.
2003
Ferlinghetti is elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
2007
Ferlinghetti is named Commandeur, French Order of Arts and Letters.
August Ferlinghetti and others petition New York Pacifica Radio station WBAI-FM to play Allen Ginsberg’s 1959 recording of “Howl” in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the victory in People v. Ferlinghetti. Despite initial interest, fears of catastrophic FCC fines for “indecency” ultimately prevailed. Instead, WBAI ran a program “Howl against Censorship,” on the Pacifica.org Internet site, which included Ginsberg’s reading of “Howl” and a phone interview with Ferlinghetti, who ended by reciting excerpts from his poem “Pity the Nation.”
2010
60 Years of Painting, a retrospective of Ferlinghetti’s artwork, is staged in Rome and Reggio Calabria.
Andrew Rogers portrays Ferlinghetti in the film Howl.
2012
Ferlinghetti declines to accept an award of the inaugural Janus Pannonius International Poetry Prize from the Hungarian PEN organization after learning that the Hungarian government under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was a partial sponsor of the prize of 50,000 Euros. He expresses his opposition to the “right wing regime” of the Prime Minister.
2013
Christopher Felver’s documentary, Lawrence Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder, is released.
2017
October The recipient of many American and Italian awards for his contributions to arts and blletters, Ferlinghetti is conferred with the Career Award at the XIV edition of the Premio di Arti Letterarie Metropoli di Torino.
2019
March Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s experimental new book, Little Boy—blending autobiography, literary criticism, poetry, and philosophy—is published in honor of the author’s centenary.
March 24 Ferlinghetti’s 100th birthday, which is celebrated nationally and internationally.