国立アメリカ歴史博物館さんのインスタグラム写真 - (国立アメリカ歴史博物館Instagram)「This week, we're reflecting on the life of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. A poet, painter, publisher, and political activist, Ferlinghetti was one of the most influential figures of the 1950s Beat Generation and the social revolutions of the 1960s. City Lights Bookstore, co-founded by Ferlinghetti in 1953, became a home for poets and writers and one of the nation’s most celebrated literary centers. In 1954 City Lights started publishing volumes with works by writers like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, and William Carlos Williams. Ferlinghetti’s best remembered work, “A Coney Island of the Mind,” is widely considered a modern classic. In 1956 Ferlinghetti published Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” That same year, San Francisco police arrested Ferlinghetti and the bookstore manager on obscenity charges for selling the book. The trial became a national case over artistic freedom of expression. It eventually established a key legal precedent for the publication of controversial work with “redeeming social importance.” The case opened the way for an explosion of new works that tested the boundaries of literary expression in the late 1950s and 1960s. Ferlinghetti acquired this typewriter in the 1950s and wrote many of his early works on it. The typewriter later found a home in the City Lights Bookstore basement, where it was available to customers, writers, and friends. Ferlinghetti wrote, “I don’t remember when I wrote ‘Look & Think’ on the front of the typewriter (and the LF initials on the side), but that embodied my poetic practice, that is, my most important precepts for writing poetry.”」2月27日 23時54分