An iconic photo (SFChronicle.com)
On Dec. 5, 1965, a remarkable assembly of 23 Beat poets and friends gathered at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, orchestrated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Captured by photographer Peter Breinig, the reunion was later dubbed the “Last Gathering of the Beats.”
The photo, published in the San Francisco Chronicle the next day with the headline “Portrait of the Artists as Old Men,” featured literary icons including Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure. Several were still basking in their literary fame from the 1950s Beat movement, but by then, a counterculture shift was happening in the city.
“I was looking at those great old photographs of the Paris Surrealists in the ’20s, and I thought it’d be a good thing to get one like that before the whole scene disappears in a cloud,” Ferlinghetti told the Chronicle in 1965.
