In discarding accepted notions of conformity in art as well as life, the Beats looked around for brothers of rebellion. Breaking the dam of cultural convention they stood on new and fertile ground and recognized as their predecessors other innovators who had appeared--the romantics, the symbolists, the surrealists, the rebels of Greenwich Village and San Francisco, writers like Blake, Rimbaud, Whitman, Apollinaire, Cendrars, Artaud, Pound, Williams, Cummings, and Wolfe. Then they looked around close at hand and found older peers in men like Kenneth Patchen, Kenneth Rexroth, Henry Miller, and one particular beacon light standing at land's end in San Francisco--Lawrence Ferlinghetti. No one better represents the various currents that emerged into the Beat movement in San Francisco's mid-1950s than this very hip Homer of the streets. Described by some as the most truly "beat" of the Beats, Ferlinghetti's life and writing stand as models of the...