other day charles announced in the collimator determined to start a paper created a shared a single purpose but to wage all-out war on mediocrity, materialism and the middlebrow. they deplored california's intellectual conditions from its preponderance of nervous dandies and the silly girls and a taste for melodrama and moralizing. the time had come for the new kind of journal more discriminating. the iran had been a good start but the bohemians outgrew it and needed a platform of its own so the story continues and i wish i had more time to keep reading. but i thought i would stop there and open up questions. so thank you for listening. [applause] guesser? >> i would like -- i got this book a couple of weeks ago and i

haven't finished it, but i've been very impressed by what you wrote. i wanted to ask you how did you get involved with mark twain in all of this? i read mark twain when i was a teenager and i read tom sawyer and huckleberry finn. i never read king arthur or the innocents abroad but i read essays and i knew mark twain was involved in many different things like the imperialist league. so i was curious where -- it's an excellent book. i deeply appreciate -- >> i always wanted to write about san francisco to you i was fascinated in california history and i have a sense we had a vague sense that he spent time here but we aren't really sure how much time. and it turns out as i learn more about how much time he spent at

how formative those years had been i realized that is the story that i wanted to write and you mentioned the anti-imperialist league i think it is better known to us that we think of in our minds i wear to me this was a stranger in a kind of fascinated me that these emotions were closer to the surface and to see him in this kind of embryonic phase where his emotions are a bit more extreme and the fundamental aspectend of the fundamentalaspe starting to come together. to me that was fascinating and i think the california context for me that was a big plus. any other questions clicked yes sir. >> i have a question. i was wondering given that san francisco has long been the bastion of rights and literature and culture what has been the

reception of the past year or so and has he been claimed as a kind of precursor to the life of castro or how would you describe him later on? >> i think that he has been rediscovered as a kind of forefather in san francisco. it's tough because as i mentioned in the passage that i read, the word gay wouldn't have been turned and it isn't even clear how he brutalized his own sexuality to himself. he has a correspondence with walt whitman and he isn't replying to the letters and he says in the name of callousness reply to meet him and of course it's what he wrote about homosexuality. and in that there were these attempts to use the metaphor and symbols and images to describe

in another favorite phrase was an adhesive temperament and he says i recognize in you the temperament. so there are ways to describe it, but homosexuality kind of as a way that we would think of it now is not really current. any other questions? >> examining the characters with a heavy emphasis on the conduct of the time, the gold rush to earn the fortune and then get out running through the city there are analogues today and people talk of a second gold rush. were you writing with that in mind with the current situation

in mind? i haven't lived in the city for ten years. i live in new york now, but i returned a lot and came back a lot to research it and i think that inevitably did shape my thinking kind of subconsciously. unfortunately though i don't have any great things to say about those parallels. i think there is something reminiscent of the gold rush in the current revolution. certainly what it does to the ransom prices which you saw back in the day as well. but the thing i thought about a lot and haven't really come up with a very good answer is the prosperity in san francisco in the 1860s really finances its literary scene because it is a rich city you can have so many newspapers and people have the time to read them. if you go into the library of congress for 1860 to 1870 and find more than 300 different papers published in san

francisco in english, mandarin, french, you name it, that allows people to make a living on writing and that is kind of how the scene comes together. i am not sure what the parallel would be today whether it is prosperity now that would sustain another literary scene it's harder to know and suspect people in the room have strong feelings about that. yes sir. >> i don't know if this is getting beyond the historical perco that you are addressing but i'm curious how this might have affected because he was here and it wasn't that much later >> initially when i was thinking about this book he was going to be the character and he doesn't

get to the city until after the end of the civil war. so he actually does participate in this moment but it's towards the end he's friends with all of them and publishes in the monthly which is a kind of periodical that edits that is the height of bikini in san francisco. but he's a major figure in this period and obviously he stays on the leader then many of these people do. they all leave the city but he remains. he's a wonderful figure and i think that he is -- if you wanted to find a bridge between kind of 1860s san francisco literary scene and later decades he's the ideal link between those worlds. >> i wish i was able to write more about him in the book. thabutt. that would be great. yes. >> i wonder if you could talk

about the style of little bit. they had a manifesto. do you feel like they shared a sensibility and did they invent something new? spinnaker that's a good question. i think that we are to be enough people in the east were more aware or articulate in describing what they were doing. in particular are very good at deciding what is revolutionary about their own style but someone like william dean is editor of the atlantic monthly and is offers a gateway for the writers to enter the new england literary establishment how is this perceptive about why these writers represent a break from the past and what they are drawing from the frontier into this rich irony and the flow and use of dialect that he is looking at and seeing the earnest of the new american

literature which for him is necessary to modernize american literature and bring it out of it'its kind of provincial viewig of the origins and that is the crusade. so i would say that he was an invaluable resource for me to understand what was revolutionary about the style but as many artists they are not always articulate about their work. yes sir. >> so in the introduction you mentioned at the parallel between the war and the vietnam 100 years apart and reference to the west and east of geography and how that influenced the literature of the time? i was wondering if you elaborate on that further in the book or if you wanted to mention that further. >> that cultural revolution represented by the war is represented in the book and i think that it -- you can see it

in a lot of different ways. the 1860s as a period in america where all of the rules are being reprinted in warfare, politics and business and literature. it is one kind of conventional wisdom of all kinds that just kind of runs up against the new modern reality. and i can think of dozens of examples i go into a little bit here. but i think there is a parallel between that and what happens in the following century. specifically this idea of a younger generation that is rejecting the kind of traditions and the inherited wisdom of an older generation. that's happening very dramatically in america as the 1860s and in particular in the west because the west is predominantly young so they are the laboratory where the new america is being created. any other questions?

>> one thing i was thinking about is when you look bac backd you have the historical context it becomes obvious or you can make the case a certain set of writers was either revolutionary or the voice of their generation. i guess i'm kind of curious is it obvious why you let happening or did mark twain see himself that way in the corollary to that is what we be able to see where that was happening today or would we not over 30 years? >> we probably won't know. i think that you need the virtue of the hindsight in that situation and as i've mentioned before the writer himself or herself isn't a great authority on the subject of what is most interesting or revolutionary about the work you get i talk a lot about jim his jumping frog that he writes in 1865 when he is here in san francisco and i feel is a kind of birth moment for his style and his later innovations. but he himself has a very

conflict that kind of ambivalent relationship he doesn't see it necessarily that way and it works you can trackback and say this is actually where it began. so in terms of the contemporary scene we probably won't know for 30 years unfortunately we will have to wait. any other questions? yes. ..

it's no longer quite the rough-and-tumble frontier town that was before. you have still have the brothels that they are not right on the plaza. they're a little bit further back. all the same activities are happening but they have been forced to become a little bit more discreet and the kind of rampant lawlessness that you read about in the book called barbary coast where you hear about the australian thugs. his fantastic reading but by the time the bohemians arrive that