City Lights: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore

by Gioia Woods

Overview

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. 
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781647792398
Publisher:	University of Nevada Press
Publication date:	01/20/2026
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

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. 

Editorial Reviews

In City Lights: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore, Gioia Woods gifts her readers with a lively and wide-ranging cultural history of an institution that, over seventy years after its founding, still stands as a vital site of literary dissent in the United States and beyond. In Woods’s hands, the story of City Lights reminds us that other worlds are possible.” 
—Alex Trimble Young, Barrett Honors College, Arizona State University
 
“City Lights is arguably the first work of its kind to present a comprehensive history of City Lights Bookstore and its press as a cultural institution. Not only that, but its international scope will appeal to a more globally aware generation through its expansion of counterculture to include environmentalism and the exploration of gender and sexual identities.”
—Robert Bennett, professor of English, Montana State University, author of Deconstruction Post-WWII New York City: The Literature, Art, Jazz, and Architecture of an Emerging Global Capital

From the Publisher