Lamantia was born in
San Francisco, California, United States, to Sicilian immigrants and was raised in the city's
Excelsior District neighborhood. His poetry was first published in
View magazine in 1943, when he was 15 years old, and his poetry appeared in the final issue of the
Surrealist magazine
VVV the following year. He dropped out of
Balboa High School to pursue poetry in
New York City, and appeared the same year in American filmmaker
Maya Deren's
At Land. Aged just 16, Lamantia was hailed by
Andre Breton as "a voice that rises once in a hundred years". He returned to the Bay Area in 1945, and his first book,
Erotic Poems, was published a year later. Lamantia was one of the post-World War II poets now sometimes referred to as the San Francisco Renaissance, and later became involved with the San Francisco
Beat Generation poets and the
Surrealist Movement in the United States. On October 7, 1955, he was on the bill at San Francisco's
Six Gallery, where poet
Allen Ginsberg read his poem
Howl for the first time; at this event, Lamantia chose to read the poems of John Hoffman, a friend who had recently died. Lamantia was also known for his journeys with
native peoples in the United States and Mexico, participating in the
peyote-eating rituals of the
Washo Indians of
Nevada, which often inspired his poems. In the 1950s, Lamantia wrote multiple political texts, including a polemical prose text criticizing federal prohibitions of drugs. After he re-embraced
Catholicism in the later half of his life, his poetry onward began to explore Catholic themes. American writer
Nancy Peters, who was Lamantia's wife and literary editor, commented that "he found in the
narcotic night world a kind of modern counterpart to the Gothic castle—a zone of peril to be symbolically or existentially crossed." ==Works==