A few weeks ago, I reached out to Mr. Ferlinghetti, explaining that I was coming out to the city to write about him and about his San Francisco — that is, about the places that have meant something to him. I hoped to pay him a visit, I said, and to glean some thoughts about my itinerary.

At 99, Mr. Ferlinghetti is largely blind. He was not, I was told, quite up to receiving visitors. But we had two lively telephone conversations. In advance, I’d told both his publisher and his assistant that I planned to ask about his favorite places in the “cool, grey city of love,” as the poet George Sterling called it.

Yet when I rang, Mr. Ferlinghetti barked at me. “This is just the kind of interview I don’t like to do,” he said. “These sort of questions just leave me blank.” He condemned “travel section stuff.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him I was writing this article for the Travel section. I changed the subject to books and culture. Soon we were getting along like great old friends.

William S. Burroughs, the author of “Naked Lunch,” is the most undervalued Beat-era writer, Mr. Ferlinghetti told me. (Burroughs did not visit the city until the 1970s, and after that only passed through on occasion.) “His vision of the future was as profound as any writer of his generation, and that includes George Orwell.” He was cheered that Bob Dylan received the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. “Dylan was first of all a poet,” Mr. Ferlinghetti said. “His early songs were all long surrealist poems.”