San Francisco’s Literary Traditions

You may not have had any idea that Jack London was born in the South of Market district of this enchanted city, but ended up moving with his spiritualist medium mother and itinerant astrologer father to Oakland where, even then, rents were cheaper.

Devil’s Dictionary author and Pancho Villa fan Ambrose Bierce came to San Francisco after fighting in the Civil War and made a name for himself as one of America’s greatest story tellers.

And Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and Irving Stone were all born in the City by the Bay, and Robert Louis Stevenson, William Saroyan and Dashiell Hammett, all honed their art here.

San Francisco’s literary history is grand, and funny, and mysterious and pre-dates the formation of the republic with Spanish and Native American writers telling stories long before Alan Ginsberg revolutionized poetry with his rant about 1950s America, Howl. We thought it was time to put together a comprehensive literary walking tour that touches on a number of movements and writers, from the Gold Rush Era to Beatnik times that changed the course of, not only literary, but American, history.

A Howl of a start

Every Saturday at noon we start out in front of perhaps the world’s most famous independent bookstore: City Lights. In 1953, Peter Martin, an Italian who changed his name in part to stay clear of political enemies who had killed his father, started the small bookstore on the corner of Columbus and Broadway, the epicenter of the then mostly Italian neighborhood. He named it City Lights in honor of his small magazine that he published in the rented building, and the silent movie starring Charlie Chaplin that humanized the plight of the common man in industrial America. Soon thereafter another Italian, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, joined forces with him and the two started selling paperback classics. City Lights was the first all-paperback bookstore in the United States.

The two were doing okay, eking out a living, when Martin sold his interest in the bookstore to Ferlinghetti for a thousand dollars and moved back to New York. Ferlinghetti then got the bright idea to start publishing local authors and poets in the tradition of European booksellers/publishers. But what makes City Lights a Mecca for readers, writers and 1^st Amendment scholars is the fact that Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg had the audacity to take on the powers that be after they were arrested for putting out the then deemed "obscene" poem, Howl. After a trial that polarized the city and the country, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg prevailed and Howl and City Lights became sensations, catapulting the two into the national and international spotlight.

After we spend some time at the uniquely San Francisco bookstore, complete with subversive banners and mail slots for homeless poets, we head on up Broadway, or the old Barbary Coast route. Along the boulevard we stop at former clubs and nightspots where beat poets like Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso, and Kenneth Rexroth read for hipsters and jazz musicians alike. We take a peak at the club where Lenny Bruce was first arrested and we check out the then hotel where Ginsberg first stayed when he moved to San Francisco.

After we explore and relive that wondrous time, complete with a reading from Howl in front of Ginsberg’s old Montgomery Street apartment, we take a trip back into time. We stop in front of the City’s oldest street, you guessed it, Gold Street, and discuss the Gold Rush’s impact on San Francisco’s literary history.

Twain’s close call

The city’s first literary journal, The Golden Era is where Bret Harte took fledgling writer and newspaperman Mark Twain under his wing, and it’s where we stop and discuss Twain, his journey from Missouri to California and how he almost killed himself when he was fired from a local newspaper.

After discussing some of the city’s early greats, their plights and struggles, their relationship with San Francisco, and the particulars of their time spent here, we move back into the 20^th century. We stop at the location of the mother of all Bohemian cafes: The Black Cat Cafe on Montgomery, a stone’s throw from the old Bank of California building and the current site of the Transamerica Pyramid.

The Black Cat Cafe is where in the 20s and 30s, when writers like Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, F Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein were being a Lost Generation in Paris, other greats like John Steinbeck, William Saroyan and Truman Capote were making their bones. This is the cafe where Saroyan hung out and observed and wrote, eventually coming up with the play, Time of Your Life, which went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. The play is about a group of lovable misfits who all had one thing in common: the cafe where they went for sanctuary and good beer.

After heading into Chinatown and checking out the patina green building that houses Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope offices, where such movies and The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Braum Stoker’s Dracula were conceived, we make our way up Jack Kerouac Alley and complete the tour with a complimentary Jack Kerouac cocktail at Vesuvio, the bar where Kerouac, Dylan Thomas, Jack London, Ginsberg and Corso all spent many hours wiling away their sorrows and getting inspiration for that next story.

Bartender Welshes on an order

Once when the owner was opening the bar early one morning ("Open every day of the year 6 a.m.- 2 a.m"), he told the bartender to get rid of a drunk passed out in the back booth. "You get rid of him,” the bartender retorted. “I'm not waking him up – that’s Dylan Thomas!"

Ah, writers with drinking problems. Or was it what Truman Capote once said during one of his many visits to San Francisco, "We're drinkers with writing problems."

Any way you look at it, the city’s magical literary history is intoxicating.

Scott Lettieri is an author in his own write with his novel, Sinner’s Paradise, recently being published by Creative Arts Publishing out of Berkeley, CA. He also works for KGO Radio in San Francisco and is the regular fill-in host for The Wall Street Journal This Morning heard on more than 100 radio stations nationwide.