San Francisco

San Francisco, situated on one of the world's largest bays, on the central California coast, had a population in 1990 of approximately 750,000. The bay may have been sighted by Drake (1579), but the discoverer of the city's site is usually considered to be Portola, whose expedition arrived in 1770. Anza founded the mission and presidio (1776), which, under the administration of Serra, was the beginning of the pueblo Yerba Buena, the present San Francisco. The region became Mexican territory (1821), but a local insurrection, the Bear Flag War (1846), resulted in the establishment of a temporary republic, and a month later California was taken by the U.S. The gold rush of the forty‐niners caused San Francisco's mushroom growth into a busy, lawless frontier town, whose most notorious area was the Barbary Coast. The city's port flourished, with trade and immigration from the Orient, around Cape Horn, and across Panama. Overland communication with the East was established in 1860 by the pony express, and in 1869 by railroad, so that, until the rise of Los Angeles, San Francisco was the key city of the business and culture of the Far West. The discovery of the Comstock Lode created a second boom period, but later the city settled into a more conservative way of life, which has caused it to be characterized as the most Eastern of the Western cities.

On April 18, 1906, occurred the San Francisco earthquake, followed by a disastrous four‐day fire that could not be controlled, because the water mains were destroyed. The events resulted in the loss of some 500 lives, the demolition of a large part of the city's central business district and residential sections, and a loss of property estimated at between $500,000,000 and $1,000,000,000. The city emerged from the disaster with a better plan and more permanent buildings, but still retains its romantic cosmopolitan character, marked by its large Chinatown and Italian district. It is connected with the East Bay cities of Oakland and Berkeley by an eight‐mile suspension bridge, and with suburban and rural Marin County by a bridge across the Golden Gate, the mouth of the harbor. Two famous expositions have been held in San Francisco, one celebrating the completion of the Panama Canal (1915), and another the building of the two bay bridges (1939–40). The University of California⧫ is located in Berkeley, and on the peninsula south of the city is Stanford University⧫.

The period of Mexican occupation is described in R.H. Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, and the city's literary flowering occurred during the post‐gold‐rush period (c.1850–70), when its authors included Bret Harte, Clemens, Joaquin Miller, Bierce, C.W. Stoddard, Alonzo Delano, G.H. Derby, Prentice Mulford, Ina Coolbrith, H.H. Bancroft, E.R. Sill, John Muir, Clarence King, and Henry George, many of whom contributed to the Overland Monthly and The Golden Era. Among the most prominent of the many visitors to write about the area was Robert Louis Stevenson. Later writers more permanently associated with the city and its environs included Frank Norris, Jack London, Gertrude Atherton, Edwin Markham, George Sterling, and the bohemian group Les Jeunes, led by Gelett Burgess, which published The Lark. Writers who later lived to the south respectively in Carmel and the Salinas Valley included Jeffers and Steinbeck. Authors associated with the city and its environs include Oscar Lewis, Evan Connell, Herbert Gold, Alice Adams, and Ella Leffland, and Saroyan lived there for a time. In the mid‐ to late 1950s the Beat movement was so centered there that it was also called the San Francisco Renaissance. Its authors included Kenneth Rexroth, as an elder figure, and Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, Philip Whalen, and Michael McClure. Also related were Richard Brautigan, James Broughton, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and John Wieners. At Big Sur, south of Carmel, Henry Miller lived, and to the town's north, in Santa Cruz, William Everson settled after a period, as Brother Antoninus, in the East Bay. Authors on nearby university faculties have included Kay Boyle and Wright Morris at San Francisco State University; Yvor Winters, Wallace Stegner, Albert Guerard, and Al Young at Stanford; and Josephine Miles, Ishmael Reed, Mark Schorer, and George R. Stewart at the University of California, Berkeley.