Writing Across the Landscape ─ Travel Journals 1960-2010

Lawrence Ferlinghetti—legendary poet and best-selling author of Coney Island of the Mind—collects here his six-decade-spanning travel journals. Beginning in 1950 and dramatically traversing the latter half of the twentieth century to the present, Writing Across the Landscape positions Ferlinghetti not only as a seminal poet but also as a major and unique American voice whose heretofore personal writings are now added to the fabric of twentieth-century literary history. Illustrated throughout with facsimile manuscripts and personal sketches, the volume gives glimpses of figures like Jack Kerouac in the ’50s, William Burroughs in London, Ezra Pound in Italy, and a young Fidel Castro in Cuba at the dawn of the Revolution. Readers will journey to Mexico, Morocco, Paris, and Rome, as well as to post-Stalinist Russia on a harrowing journey on the Trans-Siberian Express. Embedded with new poems and Ferlinghetti’s pyrotechnic prose, Writing Across the Landscape evokes the people, places, and political movements that have shaped our time.