‘Little Boy was quite lost. He had no idea who he was or where he had come from. Grown Boy came into his own voice and let loose his word-horde pent-up within him.’
From growing up as an orphan in 1920s New York, to serving in the Navy at the D-Day landings in Normandy, to a vagabond life drinking in Parisian cafes, to befriending America's greatest counter-cultural writers, Little Boy has seen it all.
This is the story of one man's extraordinary life, and the madness of the century that witnessed it - a story steeped in the exhilarating energy of the Beats, a magical torrent of language that gleams with Walt Whitman's visionary spirit.
Above all, this is the literary last will and testament of the iconic publisher and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti: not only a meditation on his 99 years on the planet, rich in wisdom, emotion, and memories, but an inspiring reflection on what our future might hold.
“A volcanic explosion of personal memories, political rants, social commentary, environmental jeremiads and cultural analysis all tangled together in one breathless sentence that would make James Joyce proud ... No one alive carries the history, the writers, the personal experience of 20th-century literature in his mind as Ferlinghetti does” - The Washington Post
“This isn't a book: it's a reckoning ... Utterly extraordinary.” - The Guardian
