With the constant churn and explosion of art in the Bay Area, it’s no surprise that a large number of influential artists have called it home. While some of the greatest are no longer on this mortal plane, their work lives on in the way that only the best can: by haunting the shelves of Bay Area bookstores and libraries. Read on to revisit a few of your favorite Bay Area literary greats and to discover some who you may not have known had roots here.
Ursula K. Le Guin
We’re kicking our list off strong with influential and accomplished American novelist Ursula K. Le Guin.
- Le Guin was born and raised in Berkeley and spent her summers at a camp in the Napa Valley. While she specialized in science fiction and fantasy — it’s these works she’s most known for — she wrote just about everything, including children’s books and essays.
- You can try some of her award-winning fiction by picking up The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed.
Jack London
OK, yes, I know. But you really can’t talk about Bay Area literary figures and not mention someone who’s name is plastered all across Oakland.
- London grew up in Oakland and studied in Berkeley before going off to become a famous and successful writer — one of the first, apparently, to achieve worldwide success at a time before the Internet.
- You can pick up his most known classic, The Call of the Wild, but you can read about London’s home turf of the SF Bay Area in The Sea-Wolf.
Ina Coolbrith
Coolbrith is such a Bay Area literary fixture that Jack London credited her as being his “literary mother,” and she once turned down a marriage proposal from Mark Twain.
- She worked in Oakland as a librarian for most of her life, publishing poetry on the side — two things that women were still new to at the turn of the century. She was the first poet laureate of any of the states when she was awarded the title for California in 1915. Despite the honor, however, Coolbrith believed that she had to leave California to be truly recognized as a writer.
- If you want to read her work, try her poetry collection Songs from the Golden State.
Mark Twain
In the mid-1860s, San Francisco found itself under the critically funny eye of Mark Twain.
- The writer and humorist worked for multiple newspapers in the city for only a few months before getting fired. Twain’s essays and letters about his time in San Francisco are collected in the appropriately but obviously titled Mark Twain’s San Francisco.
- If you’re looking for the part where he writes, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,” you’ll have to keep looking — he never wrote it.
Allen Ginsberg
If you’ve ever wanted to read one poem that’s an entire book long and denounces all forms of capitalism and conformity, then Ginsberg is your man.
- Synonymous with the counterculture of the Beat generation, Ginsberg’s Howl is a foul, roaring critique of capitalist systems. It was so controversial that it caused fellow Beat poet and City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti to be arrested on charges of disseminating obscene literature.
- That’s a helluva San Francisco–sounding statement right there (note: Ferlinghetti is still kicking at a gracious 98 at the time of this article’s publication, so he has not been included in this list).
Jack Kerouac
Another famous forerunner of the Beat generation, Kerouac specialized in long-form fiction full of winding sentences and characters that moved through a time-capsule version of post–World War II America.
- Kerouac wrote On the Road while working in San Francisco and crashing in a friend’s loft.
- The work has cemented his status as an iconic American writer and an influential member of the Beat movement — even if he didn’t necessarily agree with all of it.
John Muir
Given the impressive number of this country’s natural monuments dedicated to his memory, it should come as no surprise that John Muir is also an accomplished nature writer.
- If you’ve been to Muir Woods outside of San Francisco, then you’ve visited one of these monuments.
- The craft didn’t come as easily as his country-wide adoration, however, and Muir was known as an author who really had to work at his writing. You can see late-1800s California through the eyes of the Scottish-American by reading Picturesque California.
Philip K. Dick
Crafting science fiction that dealt with authoritarian governments and big, bad corporations, Dick and his work live happily in the Bay Area writer tradition we’re seeing so far.
- He attended high school with Ursula K. Le Guin in Berkeley (although the two didn’t know each other) before being dismissed from a short stint at UC Berkeley.
- You may recognize his book The Man in the High Castle as the inspiration for the critically acclaimed Amazon show of the same name.
Erle Stanley Gardner
One of the only writers on this list whose work went on to become a television show, Gardner is known for writing classic pulp-fiction detective novels.
- Gardner graduated from Palo Alto high school before it was a popping tech metropolis before running away from the Bay for Baja-er pastures.
- He wrote the popular Perry Mason detective series in his spare time while working as a litigations lawyer. He left the firm after his first novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, was published. In addition to the massive number of Perry Mason novels he published, Gardner then went on to do travel articles — including a series about his excursions to Baja California.
Maya Angelou
Like most great writers, Angelou’s path to writing was not straightforward.
- She was San Francisco’s first black woman to work as a street-car operator and a popular calypso dancer in some of the city’s bigger night clubs. Like Coolbrith, Angelou also had to leave the Bay to gain literary fame, publishing for the first time after joining the Harlem Writers Guild in New York City.
- Start with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and follow it up with And Still I Rise to get a taste of both her autobiographical work and poetry.
