San Francisco in Fiction: Essays in a Regional Literature Review

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(More customer reviews)As a high school English teacher who is designing a course on the literature of the Bay Area, I have found this collection of critical essays indespensible. The introduction sets the stage, tying together the landscape, history, and culture of the San Francisco area in order to generate a cohesive view of the literature of this region. The key question here is what makes the literature of the Bay Area distinct? What unifies the literature of this region? Fine and Skenazy present a view of Bay Area writing that ranges from the post-gold rush, pre-earthquake days of Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Ambrose Bierce to modern voices such as Amy Tan, Richard Rodriguez and Maxine Hong Kingston. They illustrate the ways in which the literary scene of the Bay Area has grown and transformed, moving from the newsapaper articles and short stories written from a predominantly white male perspective, to a more inclusive, broder regional identity. Incidently, their definition of "San Francisco stories" is admittedly wide-ranging; they have included writers from as far afield as Santa Cruz to the south and Sacramento to the west. The essays feature analyses of the work of Frank Norris, Jack London, Dashiell Hammett, William Saroyan, Jack Kerouac, Wallace Stegner and others I've mentioned above.
While my interests in the subject at hand are mostly academic, I imagine that anyone interested in the rich--if brief--history of the Bay Area would enjoy reading these essays. As a collection, the essays raise and adress interesting questions about how a place can shape writing. They also ask the reader to look at the character of the Bay Area and consider why it is as it is--unique and complex, a land of travelers, heading forever west, hoping to strike it rich.

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"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.

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