Interview with Ferlinghetti

Yesterday the Guardian, lately my favorite source of literary news, ran an article by Nicholas Wroe based on an interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the beat poet and co-founder of San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore. Although Ferlinghetti is an important writer, perhaps our greatest debt to him is for his fight to publish and sell Allen Ginsberg's book "Howl." Not only was he the Ginsberg's Sylvia Beach, but he got the ACLS to defend him when a batch of the books were seized, leading to a landmark decision by Judge Clayton Horn, who declared that a work could not be considered obscene if it had "the slightest redeeming social significance," assuring our rights as writers, and enabling the publication of classics such as "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and Henry Miller's Tropics books.