''A Coney Island of the Mind'' is a collection of poetry by

Lawrence Ferlinghetti Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti (March 24, 1919 – February 22, 2021) was an American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. The author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, an ...

originally published in 1958. It contains some of Ferlinghetti’s most famous poems, such as “I Am Waiting” and “Junkman's Obbligato”, which were created for

jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a m ...

accompaniment. There are approximately a million copies in print of ''A Coney Island'', and the book has been translated into over a dozen languages. It remains one of the best-selling and most popular books of poetry ever published. Because some of the material had been previously published, the first edition of ''Coney Island'' bears both a 1955 and a 1958 copyright. ''Coney Island'' was written in the conservative post-war 1950s, and the poems “resonate … with a joyful anti-establishment fervor”. In 1967, a presentation of ''A Coney Island of the Mind'' was broadcast on ''

NBC Experiment in Television ''NBC Experiment in Television'' is an American experimental television show broadcast on NBC from 1967 to 1971. The format of the show was an anthology series and it usually aired on Sunday afternoons. Many of the episodes were either dramatic pi ...

''. In 2008, New Directions published a Special 50th Anniversary Edition with a CD of the author reading his work.

References

External links

Litencyc.com

Citylights.com

1958 books American poetry collections Beat poetry Culture of San Francisco New Directions Publishing books {{anthology-book-stub