Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in 1919 in Yonkers, New York, and has reached literary fame as both a poet and a bookseller. He was a central figure in the Beat movement of the 1950s and early 1960s with his message for people to free themselves from conventional traditions in both life and art. His collections of poetry include A Coney Island of the Mind, Starting from San Francisco, Who Are We Now?, and These Are My Rivers. Ferlinghetti has also published and sold the works of Beat writers and other new and nontraditional authors in his City Lights bookstore in San Francisco.