Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 101, was icon of San Francisco poetry and publishing

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the founder of San Francisco’s City Lights Booksellers and Publishers, a poet and towering Beat movement figure, died on Monday at the age of 101.

Ferlinghetti — who opened City Lights in 1953 as the country’s first all-paperback bookstore and turned it into a San Francisco icon — wrote and published poetry until he was 100, including the bestselling “A Coney Island of The Mind.”