Lawrence Ferlinghetti's 'experimental' new book due in time for 100th birthday

Blending autobiography, literary criticism poetry and philosophy, Little Boy will be published in March 2019, the author’s centenary

The 99-year-old poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the last surviving members of the Beat generation, has sold an “experimental” new novel to a major American publisher, and it is due out in time for his 100th birthday.

Ferlinghetti, one of the US’s best-loved poets and a veteran of the second world war, told the New York Times that the book, Little Boy, was “not a memoir, it’s an imaginary me”. He added: “It’s an experimental novel, let’s put it that way … It’s the kind of book that I’ve been writing all my life.”