Pictures of the Gone World

Lawrence Ferlinghetti: It is really much more interesting today than in the 50's. There has been all of this mythologizing of the 50's and the Beat generation in San Francisco and so forth, but it has been wildly overdone, because it was a really depressing period, I thought, on account of the general repressive atmosphere and the political climate. The most interesting writing now is coming out of third world authors and women -- it takes hunger and passion to create great books.