Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet, artist, and publisher of some of America’s most enduring Beat literature, died Monday at the age of 101 at his San Francisco home, the New York Times reports.

Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York, and educated at the University of North Carolina and Columbia University. In 1953, he co-founded City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco; two years later, he founded its sister business, a publishing company also called City Lights.

City Lights would go on to publish books by poets such as Denise Levertov, Gregory Corso, and Diane di Prima. Its most notable publication was Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, widely considered one of the greatest works of Beat poetry. The book led to Ferlinghetti’s arrest on an obscenity charge; he was later acquitted.

Ferlinghetti was a prolific poet, playwright, and author of nonfiction; his books include A Coney Island of the Mind, The Secret Meaning of Things, and How to Paint Sunlight. In a 2015 interview with Kirkus about his collection of travel writing, Writing Across the Landscape, Ferlinghetti said, “The best travel leads to poetry. You can say the best prose rises to the level of poetry, and I tried to do that.”

Admirers of Ferlinghetti paid tribute to him on social media. On Twitter, journalist Jelani Cobb wrote, “Rest In Peace to Lawrence Ferlinghetti. City Lights is among my favorite bookstores in the country. Not many people can say they both built an institution and became one.”

And editor Oscar Villalon tweeted, “I know Lawrence Ferlinghetti is no longer with us, but he’ll live on. The many of us who call City Lights a second home, the many of us who take heart in his humane vision of the world, and the many poets writers who keep doing the work in spite of everything will assure that.”

Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.