de Young Museum

Already an established writer known for his pacifist sympathies and the 1941 anti-war novel Journal of Albion Moonlight, Kenneth Patchen (1911–1972) and his wife, Miriam, settled in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood of San Francisco in 1950. They became friendly with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder of the City Lights publishing company and bookstore and Patchen became a contributor to Ferlinghetti’s Pocket Poets series. He was linked with the Beat movement, particularly when he released home recordings he had made of himself reading his poetry to jazz accompaniment, inadvertently inspiring the creation of the so-called poetry and-jazz movement.