The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

(Paperback)

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1860s San Francisco. The Gold Rush has ended; the Civil War threatens to tear apart the country. The bards of the moment are the Bohemians: a young Mark Twain, fleeing the draft and seeking adventure; literary golden boy Bret Harte; struggling gay poet Charles Warren Stoddard; and beautiful, haunted Ina Coolbrith, poet and protectorate of the group. Ben Tarnoff's elegant, atmospheric history reveals how these four pioneering western writers would together create a new American literature, unfettered by the heavy European influence that dominated the East.

Reviews

The New Yorker
Tarnoffs book sings with the humor and expansiveness of his subjects prose, capturing the intoxicating atmosphere of possibility that defined, for a time, Americas frontier.

San Francisco Chronicle
Tarnoff breathes fresh life into his narrative with vivid details from the archives giving us a rich portrait of a lost world overflowing with new wealth and new talent... [A] stylish and fast-paced literary history.

Chicago Tribune
Engrossing... By skillfully tracking the friendships and fortunes of this unusual quartet, Tarnoff narrates the awakening of a powerful new sensibility in American literature.... Tarnoff powerfully evokes the western landscapes, local cultures and youthful friendships that helped shape Twain. He has a talent for selecting details that animate the past.

Wall Street Journal
Rich hauls of historical research, deeply excavated but lightly borne.... Mr. Tarnoffs 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.

Boston Globe
Delightful.... Adeptly wrapping a wonderful story around these young writers, Tarnoff glides smoothly along, never dwelling too long and never claiming too much. He stacks fifty pages of endnotes at the back of the book but such archival sweat doesnt show in the prose.

Washington Post
Tarnoff is a good storyteller and character-portraitist, with a deep knowledge of the West Coat.

Minneapolis Star Tribune
Meticulously researched and exhilarating Twain may be the main draw of Tarnoffs book, but Tarnoffs writing about a few of Twains contemporaries Bret Harte, Charles Warren Stoddard, Ina Coolbrith is just as engaging.

Kansas City Star
Tarnoff successfully contributes to the compendium [of Twain scholarship] with a fresh take on Twains San Francisco circle, which was akin to the Algonquin Roundtable in Manhattan or Lost Generation of writers in Paris.

The Daily Beast
LivelyTarnoff draws a vivid contrast between sardonic, sophisticated, and sartorially dapper [Bret] Harte, San Franciscos literary star, and the unkempt, uncouth Mark Twain who rolled into town in 1863, a scuffling newspaperman looking to move on and up from provincial Virginia City, Nevada.

The New Yorker's Page-Turner blog
Tarnoff provides a fascinating snapshot of the era, when the citys prosperity and unique international character (he points out that in 1860 almost two-thirds of the citys adult males were foreign-born) brought about a thrilling, if chaotic, admixture of idealism and fun.

The Oregonian
Deftly written, wholly absorbing.

Publishers Weekly
Tarnoffs glimmering prose lends grandeur to this account of four writers (Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Ina Coolbrith) who built an extraordinary literary scene in the frontier boom town of 1860s San Francisco.The lively historical detail and loving tone of the interwoven biographies make a highly readable story of this formative time in American letters, starring San Francisco as the city that lifted Twain to literary greatness.

Booklist
Tarnoff energetically portrays this irresistible quartet within a vital historical setting, tracking the controversies they sparked and the struggles they endured, bringing forward an underappreciated facet of American literature. We see Twain in a revealing new light, but most affecting are Tarnoffs insights into Hartes downward spiral, Stoddards faltering, and persevering Coolbriths triumph as Californias first poet laureate.

Author Bio

BEN TARNOFF is the author of A Counterfeiter's Paradise. He has written for the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. He lives in New York City.