Lawrence Ferlinghetti was a poet, publisher, painter and social activist born in 1919 in New York. He served in World War II before earning degrees from the University of North Carolina, Columbia University, and the Sorbonne. In 1953, he co-founded City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco and its publishing arm, City Lights Publishers, which published seminal Beat Generation works like Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems and established Ferlinghetti as a leader of the Beat movement. As a poet, his most famous work is A Coney Island of the Mind, which has been translated into many languages. He also pursued a career in painting later in life.