San Francisco in Fiction: Essays in a Regional Literature

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Critical Collection
Review: 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.