Lawrence Ferlinghetti (c.1919– ), poet and publisher, was born in Yonkers, New York. He earned a doctoral degree in poetry at the Sorbonne in Paris with a dissertation entitled "The City as Symbol in Modern Poetry: In Search of a Metropolitan Tradition." In 1951 Ferlinghetti settled in San Francisco, where he started a magazine called City Lights, named after a 1931 Charlie Chaplin movie. He also started a bookstore on the ground floor, a center for "beat" writers, now one of the most famous bookstores in the world. Popular during the 1950s, the Beat Generation of poets and writers were influenced by existentialism and Eastern philosophy. They adopted rhythms of simple American speech and progressive jazz.

Ferlinghetti was a central figure in the Beat movement of the 1950s and 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 (1958), Starting from San Francisco (1967), and Open Eye, Open Heart (1974).