City Lights Books Store Beat Generation Jack Kerouac Allen Ginsberg Poetry R103
by Wingsdomain Art and Photography
Title
City Lights Books Store Beat Generation Jack Kerouac Allen Ginsberg Poetry R103
Artist
Wingsdomain Art and Photography
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Photograph - Photograph
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City Lights Books Store Beat Generation Jack Kerouac Allen Ginsberg Poetry R103
Before there was the 60’s, there was the Beat Generation, a literary movement that explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The central elements of the Beat culture were the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration. The core group of the Beat Generation authors – Herbert Huncke, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and Jack Kerouac – met in 1944 in and around the Columbia University campus in New York City.
Meanwhile, in 1953, at the height of the Beat Generation, two poets in San Francisco, a middle aged Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin opened a small independent bookstore at the corner of Columbus Avenue and Adler Alley or Adler Place, now Jack Kerouac Alley, and named the bookstore City Lights Bookstore paying homage to the 1952 Charlie Chaplin film with the same name.
A couple years later, in 1955, Wally Hedrick ,a co-founder of the Six Gallery (formerly known as the King Ubu Gallery) at 3119 Fillmore Street, asks Ferlinghetti to organize a poetry reading at the Six Gallery, now known as the “Six Gallery Reading”. The event which took place on Friday, October 7, 1955, was advertised as “Six Poets at the Six Gallery” in which among other presenters, Ginsberg was to make his first public presentation of the “Howl”. The “Howl”, written by Allen Ginsberg from 1954-1955, was a controversial collection of poems due to its many references to illicit drugs and sexual practices, both heterosexual and homosexual. Not long after the Six Gallery Reading, in 1956 Ferlinghetti published Ginsberg’s controversial book the “Howl” which was promptly banned shortly after its publication. Ferlinghetti and the bookstore’s manager, Shigeyoshi Murao, were both arrested and charged with disseminating obscene literature, taking along with it the first amendment to trial. On October 3, 1957, Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene, both Ferlinghetti and Murao were acquitted.
But change was already stirring in the air. The Beat generation had come out of the 50’s victorious even as their numbers were waning, the 60’s were on the horizons, and the City Lights Bookstore was born.
-W
City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco, California, that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin (who left two years later). Both the store and the publishers became widely known following the obscenity trial of Ferlinghetti for publishing Allen Ginsberg's influential collection Howl and Other Poems (City Lights, 1956). Nancy Peters started working there in 1971 and retired as executive director in 2007. In 2001, City Lights was made an official historic landmark. City Lights is located at 261 Columbus Avenue in Chinatown, near the border of North Beach. -wikipedia
The Beat Generation was a literary movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized throughout the 1950s. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration. Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) are among the best known examples of Beat literature. Both Howl and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize publishing in the United States. The members of the Beat Generation developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity. -wikipedia
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April 9th, 2019
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