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Book Cover for: Americus, Book I, Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Americus, Book I

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti lights out for the territories with Book I of his own born-in-the-U.S.A. epic, Americus.

Describing Americus as "part documentary, part public pillow-talk, part personal epica descant, a canto unsung, a banal history, a true fiction, lyric and political," Ferlinghetti combines "universal texts, snatches of song, words or phrases, murmuring of love or hate, from Lotte Lenya to the latest soul singer, sayings and shibboleths from Yogi Berra to the National Anthem, the Gettysburg Address or the Ginsberg Address, that haunt our nocturnal imagination." This book is a wake-up call that breaks new ground in the grand tradition of Whitman, W.C. Williams, Charles Olson, and Ezra Pound, as Ferlinghetti cruises our literary and political landscapes, past and present, to create an autobiography of American consciousness.

Book Details

  • Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
  • Publish Date: Sep 17th, 2005
  • Pages: 90
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.96in - 6.12in - 0.30in - 0.40lb
  • EAN: 9780811216418
  • Categories: American - General

About the Author

Ferlinghetti, Lawrence: - In 1953 Lawrence Ferlinghetti cofounded City Lights, the first paperback bookstore in the United States, a Mecca for millions. His Coney Island of the Mind is one of the best-selling volumes of poetry by any living American poet. Born in Yonkers, New York, in 1919, Ferlinghetti has received the Robert Frost Memorial Medal and the first Literarian Award of the National Book Foundation.

Praise for this book

"From the heartland of true heart comes this eloquent poem of our country's fact and fate. Lawrence Ferlinghetti is our determined conscience, our wit and eloquence--"our steadfast friend and witness--"and our communal wisdom's articulate, patiently insistent old time voice. Would that all might stand up as he and be counted!"