Here and elsewhere
The region had not waited for the arrival of the Europeans to show itself as a hospitable place and the Ohlone Amerindians were said to have inhabited it for several thousand years when the birth of Christ marked the beginning of our era. However, San Francisco is closely linked to the Spaniards who in 1769 founded a fortress, the first outline of a city that would continue to grow until it became the second largest in the United States after New York. San Francisco came under the domination of the Mexicans and then, in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, under that of the Americans who named it after the patron saint of missionaries, Francis of Assisi, who was also noted for his writings. The City was located at the end of the first railroad in the country and enjoyed a popularity that was conducive to the creation of a newspaper that would become a daily, theAlta California, to which Mark Twain (1835-1910), a native of Missouri and future author of the Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), would contribute as a reporter. Times were also favorable for the development of entertainment, so it was not too surprising that David Belasco (1853-1931) was "born on the stage" and honed his skills in all the theatrical professions of his native city, before moving to Nevada and then to New York, where he began to write, producing a prolific body of work, with more than 100 plays (Hearts of Oak, The Heart of Maryland, Du Barry
...), which earned him fame and posterity. Her fellow citizen and younger by 4 years, Gertrude Atherton, also traveled but kept returning to California where she died in 1948, at the honorable age of 90, and where she set most of her novels. It was under the pseudonym of Asmodeus that she chose to publish her first text in 1882, as a serial in The Argonaut, in order to protect her family, who indeed reprimanded her severely when they learned that she was the author of The Randolphs of Redwood: a romance. The early death of her husband in 1887 may have resolved the situation, but the following year she published a new novel(What Dreams May Come), again under a different name (Frank Lin), but she embarked on a successful career that was crowned by her bestseller Black Oxen (1923), which was adapted into a silent film under the same title. An emancipated woman and feminist before her time, Gertrude Atherton developed throughout her life a social conscience that influenced the choice of subjects on which she dwelt, although she did not refuse to indulge in fantasy stories on occasion. Like his perfect opposite, Eugene Torquet left San Francisco and never returned as soon as he came of age, at 21 in 1881, to the great displeasure of his parents, both of French origin, from whom he inherited this taste for elsewhere. During the endless wandering that constituted his life, he still took the time to publish under the name of John-Antoine Nau poems and novels, the first of which, Force ennemie, will receive the Prix Goncourt in 1903. However, the public did not appreciate this strange story of an alien taking over the body of a human, but this did not disturb the author who continued his work and his world tour, until death surprised him prematurely at 57 years, in Tréboul, in Finistère.From adventure to the Beat Generation
Punctuated by moves as well as bereavements, the life of Robert Frost (1874-1963) was certainly not the simplest, but his poetry (Les Forts ne disent rien, éditions Ressouvenances) - quite different from that of the authors of his time - introduced naturalism, which was to become one of the major themes exploited by his fellow countrymen. Thus, one of the most famous writers born in San Francisco - John Griffith Chaney, better known under the name of Jack London, which he inherited from his father-in-law, John London - will praise the wilderness, as it is revealed in The Call of the Wild, which is still one of his "classics. Although his life was short - he died at the age of 40, in 1916 - it was nonetheless full, leaving him time to write an abundant body of work, partly inspired by his own adventures. From his youth, where literature served as a comfort, to the publication of his first short story (To the man on the trail) in 1899, he was indeed on the move, working in a hundred jobs, collecting a thousand stories that would feed his pen. If the beginning of the new century found him mature, married, a father, involved in politics, a recognized writer and a great reporter, his alcohol problems nevertheless precipitated his fall. From vagabond in La Route to boxer in Sur le ring, he reveals himself in his books that mix the intimate (Martin Eden, John Barleycorn) and the travelogue (The Snark Cruise), fiction (The Little Lady in the Big House) and reality (The People Below). The entirety of his writings can be discovered with great pleasure at Libretto. It will be difficult not to associate him with the talent of John Steinbeck who, although a native of Salinas, worked for the San Francisco News. Just as realistic and political, he was a champion of the Great Depression, notably with The Grapes of Wrath, which described the forced exile of a family of sharecroppers to California. This book, which won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize, left a definitive mark on world literature, but it is only part of his work, since the Nobel Prize for Literature he received in 1962 also saluted (though belatedly, according to some) Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, Sardine Street, East of Eden
.. If Steinbeck is affiliated with the Lost Generation, that of the interwar period, it was not until the end of the Second World War that San Francisco enjoyed a "renaissance" that was once again placed under the seal of travel and above all under that of poetry, thanks to Madeline Gleason (1903-1979) who formed a Poets' Guild and organized the first Festival of Modern Poetry in April 1947. During two evenings, at the Lucien Labaudt Gallery of art, a dozen artists will perform on stage and give The City its reputation as a city of counter-culture. Among these poets, we should at least mention Kenneth Rexroth, born in 1905 in Indiana, an anarchist activist with a passion for the Japanese art of haiku, Robert Duncan (1919-1988) who studied at Black Mountain College (an experimental university in North Carolina where an eponymous avant-garde movement was born) and practiced symbolism from his first collection(Heavenly City Earthly City) published in 1947, and Jack Spicer, also influenced by surrealism, who opened the Six Gallery in 1955, two years after another emblematic place was created: the City Lights bookstore co-founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferlinghetti soon expanded his activities by publishing books of poetry, including Howl by Allen Ginsberg, one of the three founding members of the Beat Generation (from the French word "béat" or the American slang term "beat" meaning worn out, tired). Indeed, even if it is in New York that this poet born in 1926 in Newark met William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) and Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), his two companions, it is San Francisco that will exert his fascination, becoming the goal or the starting point of their long escapes during which Neal Cassady, the hero of On the Road (1957), will drive them furiously from one coast to another of the United States. In 1959, it was in Paris that Burroughs published The Naked Feast, an experimental novel using the "cut-up" technique and written under the influence of various hallucinogenic drugs, giving the third representative work of this literary trend to which many writers were later associated, including Jack Micheline and Gary Snyder, both born in San Francisco, respectively in 1929 and 1930. The first of them devoted himself to a bohemian life and haunted the jazz clubs as much as the slums of Greenwich Village where he settled in the 1950s. A pure figure of the underground, he is less known in France and very little translated, except for Un fleuve de vin rouge published by Dernier télégramme, a publishing house in Limoges. The second will undoubtedly embody the more spiritual aspect of the movement, taking an interest in Buddhism, living in an ashram, studying Amerindian culture and becoming one of the spearheads of bioregionalism, one of the trends of ecology conceptualized in the 1960s in California by Peter Berg. His abundant work(La Pratique sauvage or Montagnes et rivières sans fin, for example, published by Le Rocher) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 when Turtle Island was published.An open city
The "beatniks" will soon give way to the "hippies" who will meet during the famous "Summer of Love" which will take place in 1967 in the Haight-Ashbury district. Since then, San Francisco has never lost its reputation as an open, tolerant and multicultural city. An image that a series of novels will contribute to make universal, thanks to a writer who was born in Washington in 1944 but who had adopted The City when he was not yet 30 years old. A career journalist, Armistead Maupin would turn his hand to fiction, writing a serial about the life of his apartment building that would quietly appear in the Pacific Sun, a local newspaper, until it was spotted by the San Francisco Chronicle. Although he did not suspect it, the writer had a recipe that would quickly conquer a very large audience, mixing tenderness and humanity, not hesitating to address more and more openly themes such as homosexuality, which will also be found in Mes Animaux sauvages (published by Philippe Rey) by Franciscan Kevin Bentley. The San Francisco Chronicles will have nine volumes, the last to date is Anna Madrigal
which L'Olivier translated in 2015. They inspired a TV series but are also the subject of a comic book adaptation since 2020 by Isabelle Bauthian (script) and Sandrine Revel (drawing) for Steinkis editions. The San Francisco of the 70s, which served as a setting for Armistead Maupin, saw the birth of a new generation of writers who gave the city a second wind. Thus, Greg Rucka took the path of the noir novel, which his fellow citizen Robert Finnegan (1906-1947) had opened up long before him with, among other things, Les Spaghettis par la racine, the 27th title in Gallimard's famous Série noire. However, it is rather in the so particular universe of comics that Greg Rucka made himself known on our side of the Atlantic(Lazarus at Glénat, Checkmate at Urban Comics...). We could also mention Daniel Handler, born in 1970, who revolutionized children's literature with the series The Disastrous Adventures of the Baudelaire Orphans, published under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket, one of the characters of this "anti-fairy tale" in which three little prodigies suffer the worst humiliations and where the bad guys systematically win in the end. A certain black humor that excited children since no less than thirteen volumes were published between 1999 and 2006..
