Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Wit Is Afire In 'Little Boy'
As he approaches his 100th birthday, the legendary Beat poet and publisher has a new book. Billed as his "literary last will and testament," Little Boy is part memoir, part rambling free-association.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti was a literary gateway drug for me, as he was for many teenagers, generations of them — kids for whom books were life rafts, carrying us over the choppy waters between late adolescence and early adulthood. Pictures of the Gone World, A Coney Island of the Mind, and even its less promising 1997 sequel, A Far Rockaway of thet, were like instruction books in freethinking and nonconformity.
