"This is the story of the writing which came out of San Francisco and its closely related outposts, such as Virginia City, Nevada, from the Gold Rush in 1849 to the coming of the railroad in 1869... The pattern of the book is primarily biographical, built on the histories of eight central figures: Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Prentice Mulford, Ina Coolbrith, Charles Warren Stoddard, Joaquin Miller, Henry George, and Ambrose Bierce." --
An intimate look at the extraordinary figures and natural beauty of California, the world's pacesetter for the twenty-first century, in all its diversity. Through the photographs by Aranda and a combination of profiles and stories by Suppes, a lifelong Californian, the pair depict the unique personalities and natural beauty of the state, as well as its significant sites. Profiles and portraits include Governor Gavin Newsom and First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom, politicians Willie Brown and Jackie Speier, actor Kirsten Dunst, Glide Memorial Church pastor Cecil Williams, fashion designers Laura and Kate Mulleavy and Johnston Hartig, Queen Sugar author Natalie Baszile, young NASA scientists, social activists, farmers, firefighters, and award-winning astronomer Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz. From San Francisco's most significant players to the innovation hub of Silicon Valley and the creative buzz of Hollywood, California Elegance brings you the very best of the Golden State. The changing landscapes of San Francisco, the redwood forests of Humboldt, the sands of Death Valley, the wonders of Yosemite, the slopes of Lake Tahoe, the bustle of Silicon Valley, the glamour of Hollywood and so much more are chronicled by Frederic Aranda and Christine Suppes.
"In the beginning there was the bay, the land, the forty-three hills, the coastline down to Monterey, the strip of mountains, the quiet valley behind, the vast ocean, the hidden faults." And with the landscape came the stories, as Paul Skenazy and David Fine note in their introduction to this new anthology of essays. San Francisco is as much a place in the mind as on the map; if the terrain set the stage for the stories, the stories have helped remake our perceptions of the space. These twelve essays explore the relationship between place and prose--between San Francisco the city and San Francisco the territory of fiction. From the Gold Rush times of Mark Twain and Bret Harte, through the Prohibition Era of Dashiell Hammett to the Beat days of Jack Kerouac and the present works of writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and Arturo Islas, San Francisco has been blessed with great writers who have given life to the land in their fiction. These essays engage the history and geography, ethnic, gender, and class conflicts, and stylistic range of the fiction. They demonstrate how authors as various as Jack London, Gertrude Atherton, Frank Norris, William Saroyan, James D. Houston, Joan Didion, and Wallace Stegner have re-created and revised our understanding of this region.
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
Literary histories, of course, do not have a reason for being unless there exists the literature itself. This volume, perhaps more than others of its kind, is an expression of appreciation for the talented and dedicated literary artists who ignored the odds, avoided temptations to write for popularity or prestige, and chose to write honestly about the American West, believing that experiences long knowns to be of historical importance are also experiences that need and deserve a literature of importance.
Although the myth of the American frontier is largely the product of writings by men, a substantial body of writings by women exists that casts the era of western expansion in a different light. In this study of American women's writings about the West between 1830 and 1930, a European scholar provides a reconstruction and new vision of frontier narrative from a perspective that has frequently been overlooked or taken for granted in discussions of the frontier. Brigitte Georgi-Findlay presents a range of writings that reflects the diversity of the western experience. Beginning with the narratives of Caroline Kirkland and other women of the early frontier, she reviews the diaries of the overland trails; letters and journals of the wives of army officers during the Indian wars; professional writings, focusing largely on travel, by women such as Caroline Leighton from the regional publishing cultures that emerged in the Far West during the last quarter of the century; and late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century accounts of missionaries and teachers on Indian reservations. Most of the writers were white, literate women who asserted their own kind of cultural authority over the lands and people they encountered. Their accounts are not only set in relation to a masculine frontier myth but also investigated for clues about their own involvement with territorial expansion. By exploring the various ways in which women writers actively contributed to and at times rejected the development of a national narrative of territorial expansion based on empire building and colonization, the author shows how their accounts are implicated in expansionist processes at the same time that they formulate positions of innocence and detachment. Georgi-Findlay has drawn on American studies scholarship, feminist criticism, and studies of colonial discourse to examine the strategies of women's representation in writing about the West in ways that most theorists have not. She critiques generally accepted stereotypes and assumptions--both about women's writing and its difference of view in particular, and about frontier discourse and the rhetoric of westward expansion in general--as she offers a significant contribution to literary studies of the West that will challenge scholars across a wide range of disciplines.
Distinguished historian Richard W. Etulain brings together a generous selection of essays from his sixty-year career as a specialist on the US West in this essential volume. Each essay provides an invaluable overview of the rise of western literary history and historiography—including insightful evaluations of individual historians—revealing summaries of regional literature and discussions of western stories yet to be told. Together these writings furnish readers with useful considerations of important subjects about the American West. All those interested in the American West and its interpreters will find these illuminative moments of literary history and historiography especially appealing.
