Here and elsewhere
Of course, the region had not waited for the arrival of Europeans to show itself hospitable, 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 stronghold as 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 Mexican rule, then, in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo, under that of the Americans, who named it after the patron saint of missionaries, Francis of Assisi. The City was located at the end of the country's first railroad line and enjoyed a popularity that was conducive to the creation of a newspaper that was to become a daily, theAlta California, to which Mark Twain (1835-1910), a Missouri native and future author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), contributed as a reporter. Times were also favorable for the development of entertainment, so it came as no surprise that David Belasco (1853-1931) was "born on the stage", honing his skills in all the theatrical trades of his hometown before moving to Nevada and then New York, where he took up writing, producing a prolific output of over 100 plays(Hearts of Oak, The Heart of Maryland, Du Barry...), which earned him fame and posterity.
Her compatriot and 4-year younger sister, Gertrude Atherton, also traveled, but kept returning to California, where she died in 1948, at the honorable age of 90, and where most of her novels were set. It was under the pseudonym 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. Her husband's early death in 1887 may have resolved the situation, but the following year she published a new novel, What Dreams May Come, albeit under a different name (Frank Lin), and thus embarked on a successful career, crowned by her bestseller Black Oxen (1923), adapted into a silent film under the same title. An emancipated woman and feminist before her time, Gertrude Atherton developed a lifelong social conscience that influenced her choice of subjects, although she did not shy away from the occasional fantasy story. Like his perfect opposite, Eugène Torquet left San Francisco, never to return, as soon as he came of age, at 21 in 1881, much to the dismay of his parents, both of French origin, from whom he inherited his taste for elsewhere. During the endless wanderings of his life, he nevertheless took time out to publish poems and novels under the name John-Antoine Nau, the first of which, Force ennemie, won the Prix Goncourt in 1903. This strange tale of an extraterrestrial taking over the body of a human did not go down well with the public, but that didn't trouble the author, who continued his work and his world tour, until death surprised him prematurely at the age of 57, in Tréboul, Finistère.
From adventure to the Beat Generation
The life of Robert Frost (1874-1963), punctuated by moves as well as bereavements, was certainly not an easy one, but his poetry(Les Forts ne disent rien, éditions Ressouvenances) - quite different from that of the authors of his time - introduced the naturalism that was to become one of the major themes exploited by his fellow countrymen. Thus, one of San Francisco's most famous native writers - John Griffith Chaney, better known as Jack London, whom he inherited from his father-in-law, John London - was unstinting in his praise of the wilderness, as revealed in L'Appel de la forêt (The Call of the Wild), a book that is still one of his "classics". Although his life was short - he died at the age of 40, in 1916 - it was nonetheless a full one, giving him time to write an abundant body of work, inspired in part by his own adventures. From his youth, when literature served to comfort him, to the publication of his first short story(To the man on the trail) in 1899, he was indeed a man of many departures, working in a hundred trades, gathering a thousand stories to feed his pen. Although 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 precipitated his downfall. From vagabond in La Route to boxer in Sur le ring, he reveals himself in his books, which blend the intimate(Martin Eden, John Barleycorn) and the travelogue(La Croisière du Snark), fiction(La Petite dame dans la grande maison) and reality(Le Peuple d'en bas). Libretto is delighted to publish his complete works. It would be hard not to associate him with the talent of John Steinbeck, who, although born in 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 describes the forced exile of a family of sharecroppers to California. This book, which won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize, left a definitive mark on the literary world, but it represents only part of his work, as the Nobel Prize for Literature he received in 1962 also saluted (belatedly, according to some) Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, Sardine Street, East of Eden..
If Steinbeck is affiliated with the Lost Generation of the inter-war years, it wasn't until the end of the Second World War that San Francisco enjoyed a "renaissance", once again under the banner of travel and, above all, poetry, thanks to Madeline Gleason (1903-1979), who set up a Poets' Guild and organized the first Festival of Modern Poetry in April 1947. For two evenings, at the Lucien Labaudt Gallery of art, a dozen artists took to the stage and gave The City its reputation as a city of counter-culture. Among these poets are Kenneth Rexroth, born in 1905 in Indiana, an anarchist activist with a passion for the Japanese art of haiku; Robert Duncan (1919-1988), who cut his teeth at Black Mountain College (an experimental university in North Carolina that gave birth to an eponymous avant-garde movement) and began experimenting with symbolism in 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 venue had come into being: the City Lights bookshop co-founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferlinghetti soon expanded his activities by publishing books of poetry, including, in 1956, Howl by Allen Ginsberg, one of the three founding members of the Beat Generation. Indeed, although it was in New York that this poet, born in Newark in 1926, met his two companions William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) and Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), it was San Francisco that held his fascination, becoming the goal or starting point of their long escapes, during which Neal Cassady, the hero of On the Road (1957), drove them furiously from one coast of the United States to the other. In 1959, Burroughs published Le Festin nu (The Naked Feast) in Paris, an experimental novel written under the influence of various hallucinogenic drugs and using the "cut-up" technique. It was the third work representative of this literary movement, with which many writers were later associated, including Jack Micheline and Gary Snyder, both born in San Francisco in 1929 and 1930 respectively. The former devoted himself to a bohemian lifestyle, haunting jazz clubs as much as the slums of Greenwich Village, where he settled in the '50s. A pure figure of the underground, he is less well known in France and very little translated, apart from Un fleuve de vin rouge published by Dernier télégramme in Limoges. The latter undoubtedly embodied the more spiritual aspect of the movement, taking an interest in Buddhism, living in ashrams, studying Amerindian culture and becoming one of the spearheads of bioregionalism, one of the trends in ecology conceptualized in the 60s in California by Peter Berg. His abundant work(La Pratique sauvage and Montagnes et rivières sans fin, for example, published by Editions du Rocher) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 when Turtle Island was published.
An open city
The "beatniks" soon gave way to the "hippies" who gathered for the famous Summer of Love, which took place in 1967 in the Haight-Ashbury district. Since then, San Francisco has never relinquished its reputation as an open, tolerant, multicultural city - an image that a series of novels helped to make universal, thanks to a writer born in Washington in 1944 but adopted by The City when he was not yet 30. A career journalist, Armistead Maupin turned his hand to fiction, writing a serialized account of life in his apartment building, which appeared discreetly in the Pacific Sun, a local newspaper, until he was spotted by the San Francisco Chronicle. Although he didn't realize it at the time, the writer had a recipe that enabled him to quickly win over a very wide readership, mixing tenderness and humanity, not hesitating to tackle more and more openly themes such as homosexuality, which can also be found in Mes Animaux sauvages (éditions Philippe Rey) by Franciscan Kevin Bentley. The San Francisco Chronicles have nine volumes, the latest to date being Anna Madrigal, translated by L'Olivier in 2015. The story not only inspired a TV series, but has also been the subject of a comic book adaptation since 2020 by Isabelle Bauthian (script) and Sandrine Revel (drawing) for Editions Steinkis.
The San Francisco of the 1970s, which served as Armistead Maupin's setting, is witnessing the emergence of a new generation of writers who are breathing new life into the city. Greg Rucka took the path of the noir novel, a path that Robert Finnegan (1906-1947) had blazed long before him, notably with Les Spaghettis par la racine, the 27th title in Gallimard's famous Série noire. However, Greg Rucka is best known on our side of the Atlantic for his work in comics(Lazarus at Glénat, Checkmate at Urban Comics...). We could also mention Daniel Handler, born in 1970, who revolutionized children's literature with the series Les Désastreuses aventures des orphelins Baudelaire (The Disastrous Adventures of the Baudelaire Orphans ), published under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket, one of the characters in this "anti-fairy tale" in which three little prodigies suffer the worst humiliations and the villains systematically win in the end. A certain black humor that children love, as no fewer than thirteen volumes were published between 1999 and 2006..
