Ina Coolbrith
Ina Coolbrith

Author: Aleta George

Publisher:

Published: 2015-03-10

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 9780986124013

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In post-Gold Rush San Francisco, Ina Coolbrith was known as the pearl of her tribe, a tribe that included Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and John Muir. Jack London and Isadora Duncan considered her their literary godmother, and John Greenleaf Whittier knew more of her poems by heart than she did his. Regardless of the acclaim from others, Coolbrith met with a series of challenges throughout her life that tested her devotion to her art. In the end, she put her full faith in poetry and her story reveals the saving grace of creativity in a woman's life. Ina Coolbrith: The Bittersweet Song of California's First Poet Laureate is a new biography about a pioneer poet, Oakland's first public librarian, and the most popular literary ambassador in the early American West. George's deftly told and deeply researched book follows the struggles and triumphs of Coolbrith from her birth in 1841 as a niece of Mormon founder Joseph Smith to her death in 1928 as California's most beloved poet. California crowned Ina Coolbrith its first poet laureate in 1915 during San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition, and 2015 marks the centennial of her being named California's beloved first lady of letters. Aleta George writes about nature and culture in California. Her work has been featured in Smithsonian.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times. This is her first book. "Telling Coolbrith's story, author Aleta George offers an intriguing glimpse of fin de siecle California and the rousing, sometimes rowdy adolescence of our nation." -Gerald Haslam, award-winning author and professor emeritus, Sonoma State University "In a book marked by literary grace and conviction, Aleta George presents a nuanced yet compelling portrait of a major California figure." -Malcolm Margolin, Heyday Books "Coolbrith's life is so captivating that it has been waiting not just for another biographer, but for a first-rate storyteller." - David Alpaugh, Ina Coolbrith Circle

The Bohemians
The Bohemians

Author: Ben Tarnoff

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2014-03-20

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 0698151623

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An extraordinary portrait of a fast-changing America—and the Western writers who gave voice to its emerging identity At once an intimate portrait of an unforgettable group of writers and a history of a cultural revolution in America, The Bohemians reveals how a brief moment on the far western frontier changed our culture forever. Beginning with Mark Twain’s arrival in San Francisco in 1863, this group biography introduces readers to the other young eccentric writers seeking to create a new American voice at the country’s edge—literary golden boy Bret Harte; struggling gay poet Charles Warren Stoddard; and beautiful, haunted Ina Coolbrith, poet and protector of the group. Ben Tarnoff’s elegant, atmospheric history reveals how these four pioneering writers helped spread the Bohemian movement throughout the world, transforming American literature along the way. “Tarnoff’s book sings with the humor and expansiveness of his subjects’ prose, capturing the intoxicating atmosphere of possibility that defined, for a time, America’s frontier.” -- The New Yorker “Rich hauls of historical research, deeply excavated but lightly borne.... Mr. Tarnoff’s ultimate thesis is a strong one, strongly expressed: that together these writers ‘helped pry American literature away from its provincial origins in New England and push it into a broader current’.” -- Wall Street Journal

Answered Prayers
Answered Prayers

Author: Truman Capote

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2012-05-15

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 0345803043

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Although Truman Capote's last novel was unfinished at the time of his death, its surviving portions offer a devastating group portrait of the high and low society of his time. • Includes the story La Cote Basque featured in the major FX series Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans. "Prose that makes the heart sing and the narrative fly." —The New York Times Book Review Tracing the career of a writer of uncertain parentage and omnivorous erotic tastes, Answered Prayers careens from a louche bar in Tangiers to a banquette at La Côte Basque, from literary salons to high-priced whorehouses. It takes in calculating beauties and sadistic husbands along with such real-life supporting characters as Colette, the Duchess of Windsor, Montgomery Clift, and Tallulah Bankhead. Above all, this malevolently finny book displays Capote at his most relentlessly observant and murderously witty.

California Poetry
California Poetry

Author: Dana Gioia

Publisher: Heyday Books

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13:

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The first historical anthology to provide a comprehensive survey of California poetry, this ground-breaking new book presents the work of 101 authors across two centuries. California Poetry includes poets as diverse as Ambrose Bierce, Yone Noguchi, Robinson Jeffers, Josephine Miles, Charles Bukowski, Ishmael Reed, Francisco X. Alarcón, and Marilyn Chin. With ample biographical and critical notes for each author, California Poetry goes beyond the limits of the ordinary anthology and provides a detailed and often intimate account of the Golden State's rich but often neglected cultural history.

Berkeley Walks
Berkeley Walks

Author: Robert E. Johnson

Publisher: Roaring Forties Press

Published: 2015-09-28

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1938901517

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Berkeley Walks celebrates the things that make Berkeley such a wonderful walking city—diverse architecture, panoramic views, tree-lined neighborhoods, historic homes, unusual gardens, secret pathways, hidden parks, vibrant street life, trend-setting restaurants, and intriguing history. Fascinating and surprising sidelights include the apartment building from which Patty Hearst was kidnapped; Ted Kaczynski’s home before he became the Unabomber; and the residences of Nobel laureates and literary Berkeleyans such as Thornton Wilder, Ann Rice, and Philip K. Dick. Bob Johnson and Janet Byron—longtime city residents and tour guides—designed these 18 walks to showcase the many elements that make Berkeley’s neighborhoods, shopping districts, and academic areas such fun to explore. Visitors will discover a vibrant community beyond the University of California campus borders, while locals will be surprised and delighted by the treasures in their own backyards. Highlights of the book include a focus on architects Joseph Esherick, John Galen Howard, Bernard Maybeck, Julia Morgan, James Plachek, Walter Ratcliff, Jr., and John Hudson Thomas, 100 archival and original photos, and 20 maps, including a map of Berkeley bookstores.

Berkeley Bohemia
Berkeley Bohemia

Author: Shelley Rideout

Publisher: Gibbs Smith

Published: 2009-09

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9781423609056

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Berkeley Bohemia highlights the contributions of the eccentric residents of one of America's centers of cultural innovation, during a critical period in the development of the country's radical thought. These writers and artists included Ansel Adams, Jack London, Dorothea Lange, John Muir, Bernard Maybeck, Joaquin Miller, Ina Coolbrith, and Charles and Lousie Keeler and other colorful characters less well known today.Due to its vibrant setting as a crossroads of cultures, Berkeley continues as a fertile ground for individuality, eccentricity, and creative expression. The Berkeley legacy of scholars and visionaries has inspired three generations of men and women, who still make Berkeley a place where ordinary people can flourish creatively, and the extraordinary is welcomed.

Reading for Liberalism
Reading for Liberalism

Author: Stephen J. Mexal

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2020-04-01

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 1496211340

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Founded in 1868, the Overland Monthly was a San Francisco–based literary magazine whose mix of humor, pathos, and romantic nostalgia for a lost frontier was an immediate sensation on the East Coast. Due in part to a regional desire to attract settlers and financial investment, the essays and short fiction published in the Overland Monthly often portrayed the American West as a civilized evolution of, and not a savage regression from, eastern bourgeois modernity and democracy. Stories about the American West have for centuries been integral to the way we imagine freedom, the individual, and the possibility for alternate political realities. Reading for Liberalism examines the shifting literary and narrative construction of liberal selfhood in California in the late nineteenth century through case studies of a number of western American writers who wrote for the Overland Monthly, including Noah Brooks, Ina Coolbrith, Bret Harte, Jack London, John Muir, and Frank Norris, among others. Reading for Liberalism argues that Harte, the magazine’s founding editor, and the other members of the Overland group critiqued and reimagined the often invisible fabric of American freedom. Reading for Liberalism uncovers and examines in the text of the Overland Monthly the relationship between wilderness, literature, race, and the production of individual freedom in late nineteenth-century California.