'This isn't a book: it's a reckoning ... Utterly extraordinary.' Guardian

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.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in New York in 1919. He was the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers in San Francisco, where he championed many of the century's greatest authors, especially of the Beat Generation. He was arrested on obscenity charges for publishing Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Ferlinghetti has written over forty poetry collections, including the bestselling A Coney Island of the Mind, and has received a National Book Critics Circle lifetime achievement award. His memoir Little Boy was published in 2019. He died in February 2021, described by Bob Dylan as 'a brave man and a brave poet.'