The US poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, aged 94, who co-founded the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, and was tried on obscenity charges after publishing Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems in 1956, is to release a book of travel journals, the Guardian and New York Times report. Ferlinghetti is regarded as one of the last living links with the Beat generation. His journals tell of his travels to Cuba during the Castro revolution, to Africa, Haiti and Mexico, to Franco's Spain, Soviet Russia and Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, as well as time spent in Italy and France, and will also include accounts of encounters with poets such as Ezra Pound and Pablo Neruda.

He served in the US Navy during the second world war before studying at Columbia University and the Sorbonne. In 1953, he co-founded the City Lights Bookstore, launching the City Lights publishing house two years later. In 1956, he published Ginsberg's ‘Howl’, and was arrested on obscenity charges, and acquitted in the famous trial.

Ferlinghetti has published more than 30 poetry collections, including the million-selling A Coney Island of the Mind, in 1958. He appeared, with Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, in no 5 of the Penguin Modern Poets series.