Coney Island Of The Mind

The title of this book is taken from Henry Miller's and expresses the way Lawrence Ferlinghetti felt about these poems when he wrote them during a short period in the 1950's--as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul.

Ferlinghetti's has become a modern classic. It has been translated into nine languages and there are now three-quarters of a million copies in print.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1919. After receiving an A.B. degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina, an M.A. from Columbia University, and a stint in the Navy during World War II, and after working in the mail room at Time Magazine and living in Paris where he received a Doctorat de l'Universite from the Sorbonne, Ferlinghetti eventually settled in San Francisco, where he and Peter D. Martin founded the first all-paperback bookstore in the country, City Lights Books. Besides being named San Francisco's first poet laureate, he has received The Before Columbus Foundation "Lifetime Achievement Award." Most recently he has also been writing a weekly column, "Poetry as News," for the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review.