City Lights Bookstore

This bookstore changed American literature, and it did it by getting raided by the police.

City Lights was founded in nineteen fifty-three by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin. It was the first all-paperback bookstore in the country, at a time when paperbacks were considered trashy. Ferlinghetti also started City Lights Publishers, and in nineteen fifty-six, he published a thin collection of poetry by a young writer named Allen Ginsberg. The book was called Howl and Other Poems.

"Howl" was a raw, electric, furious poem about madness, sex, drugs, and the soul-crushing conformity of nineteen fifties America. In nineteen fifty-seven, US Customs seized copies being shipped from the London printer, and then San Francisco police raided this bookstore and arrested the manager, Shigeyoshi Murao, for selling obscene material. Ferlinghetti was charged too.

The trial became a national sensation. The ACLU stepped in to defend. The prosecution argued that "Howl" had no literary merit and was simply filth. The defense brought in literary scholars and critics who testified to the poem's significance. Judge Clayton Horn ruled that "Howl" was not obscene, writing that a work must be judged as a whole, not by isolated passages, and that it must be "utterly without redeeming social importance" to be banned.

That ruling didn't just free Ginsberg's poem. It set the legal precedent that paved the way for the publication of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer in the United States. By nineteen fifty-eight, twenty thousand copies of "Howl" were in print. A police raid on a tiny North Beach bookstore had accidentally blown the doors open for an entire generation of writers. City Lights is still here, still independent, still selling books that challenge you. Go inside. The poetry room is upstairs.