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Lawrence Ferlinghetti (born March 24, 1919) is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. Author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, he is best known for A Coney Island of the Mind (New York: New Directions, 1958), a collection of poems that has been translated into nine languages, with sales of over 1 million copies. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York on March 24, 1919. His mother, née Lyons Albertine Mendes-Monsanto was of French, Portuguese Sephardic Jewish heritage.... MORE

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (born March 24, 1919) is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. Author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, he is best known for A Coney Island of the Mind (New York: New Directions, 1958), a collection of poems that has been translated into nine languages, with sales of over 1 million copies. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York on March 24, 1919. His mother, née Lyons Albertine Mendes-Monsanto was of French, Portuguese Sephardic Jewish heritage. His father, Carlo Ferlinghetti, was born in Brescia, Italy in March 14, 1872. He immigrated to the United States in 1892, and was naturalized in 1896, and worked as an auctioneer in Little Italy, NYC. At some unknown point, Carlo Ferlinghetti shortened the family name to "Ferling," and Lawrence wouldn't learn of his original name until 1942, when he had to provide a birth certificate to join the US Navy. Though he used "Ferling" for his earliest published work, Ferlinghetti reverted to the original Italian "Ferlinghetti" in 1955, when publishing his first book of poems, Pictures of the Gone LESS