Writing Across the Landscape: travel journals 1960-2010
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI, EDITED BY GIADA DIANO AND MATTHEW GLEESON

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet, painter, founder of City Lights bookshop in San Francisco and its eponymous press, publisher of Allen Ginsberg and other Beat writers, remains, now aged 97, a busy man. Last year marked both City Lights’ sixtieth anniversary and recently we have had the publication of four new books, including this thrilling selection from his travel journals, most of it previously unpublished. This wonderful book is an essential link to Ferlinghetti’s poems.

Ferlinghetti has been on the road all his life. Born in New York to parents of Italian, French and Sephardic Jewish blood, he spent part of his infancy in France before being taken back to America. A submarine captain during the Normandy invasion (an experience that left him a confirmed pacifist), he studied literature at the Sorbonne. He is both entirely American and thoroughly cosmopolitan.