Pictures of the Gone World by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

He was enrolled at the Mount Hermon prep school in Massachusetts, where he led a disciplined life of prayer, work and study. The shoplifting incident ended his idyll with the Wilsons. He also engaged in minor hooliganism with a group of street youths called the Parkway Road Pirates, whose activities brought certain ironies into his young life: He formed a close bond with one of the Wilson sons, played sports, had a paper route and was a Boy Scout. His happiest time came during the Depression when the Bislands sent him to board with another family, the Wilsons, and attend a Bronxville public school. They nurtured a love of books and sent him to private schools, but they were emotionally reserved and Lawrence, who would later dub himself the “Director of Alienation” in one of his poems, often felt lonely. The Bislands - who had lost a son, coincidentally named Lawrence - raised him like their own.

But his life was ruptured again when Emily disappeared mysteriously, never to return. She took him to live in the Bronxville household of the wealthy Bisland family, which had hired her as a governess. When they returned to New York, she put Lawrence in an orphanage but later retrieved him. When the Monsantos' marriage collapsed, Emily took Lawrence to France.

Lawrence was sent to live with an uncle, Ludovic Monsanto, and his French-speaking wife, Emily, when he was 2. Soon after, his mother was hospitalized with a nervous breakdown and his family was split up. His Italian father, who changed the family name after arriving in America, died before Lawrence was born. The youngest of five sons, he was born Lawrence Monsanto Ferling in Yonkers, N.Y., on March 24, 1919. They read his poetry first, and then they went on to read more poetry,” poet, essayist and Beat figure Michael McClure, who called Ferlinghetti a master poet, told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2003. “Lawrence started probably hundreds of thousands of people reading poetry. San Francisco's first poet laureate in 1998, Ferlinghetti was an advocate of poetry as an oral tradition who read his own work with artful vigor. He is best-known for “A Coney Island of the Mind,” a collection of poems that has sold 1 million copies since it was first published in 1958 by New Directions. In the decades since, Ferlinghetti established himself as a prolific poet with strong populist underpinnings. Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg became famous, as did City Lights, still going strong after nearly 70 years in San Francisco's North Beach district.

Pictures of the Gone World by Lawrence Ferlinghetti