After the war, he studied in the United States and at the Sorbonne, where he completed his doctorate. He returned to the United States in 1953 and, together with Peter Martin, opened the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco (its name was inspired by Charlie Chaplin’s film of the same title).

Two years later, he launched City Lights Publishers, which in the following decades became a platform for some of the most important Beat and alternative literature and poetry writers. The bookstore, together with the publishing house, became a key hub, a space of intellectual exchange and expression for the emerging American counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s on the U.S. West Coast.

Ideologically, he was influenced, among others, by Buddhism and anarcho-communism. He has also exhibited his paintings on several occasions. Among his most notable literary works are the poetry collection A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), translated into nine languages and selling over one million copies, and Landscapes of Living and Dying, which received literary awards in the United States. He has also written plays.