"In a single year, 2003, the poet and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti won a lifetime achievement award from the Author's Guild, was awarded the Frost Medal by the Poetry Society of America, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his renowned City Lights Bookstore. Now, instead of sleeping on such laurel, this elder maverick of American poetry "lights out for the territories" with Book I of his own born-in-the U.S.A. epic, Americus. Describing his work as "part documentary, part public pillow-talk, part personal epic--a descant, a canto unsung, a banal history, a true fiction, lyric and political," Ferlinghetti combines "universal texts, snatches of song, words or phrases, murmuring of love or hate, from Lotte Lenya to the latest soul singer, sayings and shibboleths from Yogi Berra to the National Anthem, the Gettysburg Address or the Ginsburg Address, that haunt our nocturnal imagination." This sit-up-and-take-notice work breaks fertile ground in the grand tradition of Walt Whitman, W. C. Williams, Charles Olson, and Ezra Pound, as Ferlinghetti cruises our literary and political landscapes, past and present, to articulate the unique voice of America and create an auto-biography of American consciousness."--book jacket.