The title of this book is taken from Henry Miller's Into the Night Life and expresses the way Lawrence Ferlinghetti felt about these poems when he wrote them during a short period in the 1950's-as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul. Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind has become a modern classic. It has been translated into nine languages and there are now three-quarters of a million copies in print.