Term Papers on Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Term Paper Title	Lawrence Ferlinghetti
# of Words	1279
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	5.12

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Overview

Born : March 24, 1919
Birthplace : Yonkers, New York

Lawrence Ferlinghetti poet, innovator, and publisher, received his
M.A. from Columbia University in 1948 and his doctorate from the Sorbonne
in 1950. Ferlinghettti spent 1941to 1945 in the U.S. Navy, serving as a
command officer during the Normandy invasion. After the war, Ferlinghetti
worked for Time magazine in the mail room. He eventually left this "tedious
dead-end job" to attend Columbia in pursuit of his literary career. Inspired by
his own wartime European experiences and those described by Hemingway,
Eliot, and Miller, Ferlinghetti decided to experience the "tradition of the
American expatriate in Paris." He spent two years in Europe, traveling and
writing his doctoral dissertation in French, before returning to the U.S. in 1950.
Ferlinghetti settled in San Francisco where in 1955, he founded City Lights
Press, publishing notable authors such as Patchen, Ginsberg, Corso and
Kerouac. Ferlinghetti faced obscenity charges in 1957 for publishing Ginsberg's
Howl and Other Poems (1956), and the subsequent trail brought national
attention to the San Francisco literary movement. Also in 1957, Ferlinghetti,
together with Kenneth Patchen and Kenneth Rexroth, helped establish the Jazz
and Poetry Movement with performances in local coffee houses.

Beat Generation

     Before you can fully understand Ferlinghetti you must understand the generation in
which he lived. Like the French Impressionist artists of Paris, the Beat writers were a small
group of close friends first, and a movement later. The Beat Generation in literature
comprised a relatively small number of writers, of which Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg
and William S. Burroughs are the best known today. All three met in the environs of
Columbia University in New York City in the mid-1940's, and they remained close friends,
encouraging each other's individualistic writing efforts for more than ten years before
publishers began to take their work seriously in the late 50's.

     The Beat Generation was not a bunch of hype like today's so-called 'Generation X'.
Where Generation X is supposed to encompass millions of people identified by age, the
Beat Generation was a small group of adult writers, based in New York or the San
Francisco Bay Area and highly connected to the publishing industry. Supposedly, the name
and phone number of virtually every Beat writer was in Allen Ginsberg's address book. If
Generation X is like Woodstock, the Beat Generation was like a small dark tavern at two
in the morning, with a bunch of old jazz musicians jamming on stage and Jack Kerouac
buying rounds at the bar.

     We think of the Beat Generation as a phenomenon of the 50's, but the term was
invented by Jack Kerouac in 1948. The phrase was then introduced to the general
public in 1952 when Kerouac's friend John Clellon Holmes wrote an article, 'This is the
Beat Generation,' for the New York Times Magazine.

Becoming Ferlinghetti

     Before completing his military duty and returning to civilian life, Ferlinghetti
visited post atomic bombed Nagasaki. What exactly changed  the direction and focus for
this middle of the road American? We must remember that with the 1950’s many
important changes were happening in the US. As men and women returned from the war,
they realized that there old society and culture would not be the same. Black’s would not
go back to segregated Jim Crow communitiesand crowded in unjust and unproductive
ghettos. As well, women could not afford to return to “Housewifing.” We were frightened
of the Russian  and the projected goal of the taking over the world and ready to see
communist under our bed. Those who searched them out, like McCarthy, held the power.
The largest single group to feel  the wrath of the accusation of being communist during
the “Red Scare” were the arts. They saw the growing injustices and inequalities and began
to tell America about it in there works. Names like G...

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