City Lights, the bookstore in front of you, launched a literary revolution and stood trial for obscenity for publishing it. City Lights was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin as America's first all-paperback bookstore, a deliberate democratic gesture: paperbacks were cheap, accessible, unintimidating. The back room became the gathering place of the Beat Generation — Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, and a rotating cast of poets, painters, musicians, and philosophers who believed that American culture had gone soul-dead in the postwar years and needed to be blown open.
In 1956, Ferlinghetti published Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems — a long, incantatory poem that began with the line I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked. San Francisco police seized copies and arrested Ferlinghetti for obscenity. The trial became a national cause célèbre; the ACLU defended him; Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the poem had redeeming social importance and was not obscene.
The verdict changed what American literature was allowed to say. City Lights is still independent, still publishes poets, and still has the back room where Kerouac read. Walk in.
The poetry section in the basement is one of the finest in the country.