Author Description

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore and publishing firm are well known to everyone involved with contemporary American writing. Not well known is that they were named after and developed from City Lights magazine. The Editor, Peter Martin, started the bookstore with Ferlinghetti and now owns the New Yorker Bookshop in New York. The magazine began in 1952. In some ways it was a forerunner of the Son Francisco Renaissance, publishing such key figures in that movement as Robert Duncan, Lloyd Frankenberg, Jack Spicer, Philip Lamantia and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (then known as Ferling). Its orientation, however, was not primarily literary. It actually anticipated later intellectual involvements with an emphasis on film, sociology, cartoons and mass culture that was unusual for the time. Among those who wrote on these subjects were Pauline Kael, Manny Farber, David Riesman, Parker Tyler and Hans Meyerhoff. Some essays that expressed this major interest of City Lights magazine were: "De Sica, Dreams, and Dickens", "The New Yorker in Hollywood", "George Herriman's Krazy Kat", "Rashomon as Modern Art" and "Moon Mullins and the Place He Lives In".