san francisco in american literature and film

Evgenia Buteninaeve-butenina@yandex.ru

The Literary and Cinematographic

San Francisco in an American Literature

Classroom

“The coldest winter I ever saw was the summer I spent in San

Francisco”

From LIFE magazine, Aug. 9, 1883

British Presence in San Francisco: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Memorial

Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson’s house(Fanny Osborn-Stevenson )

The Palace Hotel hosted Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling and many other celebrities

Platt's Hall welcomed Hans Christian Andersen, Sir Conan Doyle, Walt

Whitman, Agatha Christie, and many other famous lecturers

San Francisco's Natives:Jack London's plaque

Well's Fargo Bank Building

Jack London on the 1906 earthquake

• Not in history has a modern imperial city been so completely destroyed. San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories and a fringe of dwelling-houses on its outskirts. Its industrial section is wiped out. Its business section is wiped out. Its social and residential section is wiped out. The factories and warehouses, the great stores and newspaper buildings, the hotels and the palaces of the nabobs, are all gone. Remains only the fringe of dwelling houses on the outskirts of what was once San Francisco.

Robert Lee Frost1874–1963

“Such was life in the Golden Gate:

Gold dusted all we drank and ate.

And I was one of the children told,

‘We all must eat our peck of gold’ ”

Allen Ginsburg’s Sunflower SutraI walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock

and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset

over the box house hills and cry.

Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts

of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of

machinery. […]

Berkeley, 1955

The Maltese Falcon, 1941

Vertigo, 1958

The Conversation, 1974

Bijou Cinematic Hotel

Chinese American Literature and Film: Maxine Hong Kingston ( b.1940)

Tripmaster Monkey:His Fake Book, 1989

Wittman A Sing, protagonist: “SF seemed to be a city in a good dream…”

Amy Tan (b. 1952)The Joy Luck Club,

1989

The Joy Luck Club, 1993

• Directed by Wayne Wang

• National Board of Review Award, 1993

• Nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, 1994

New Generation: Yiyun Li (b. 1972)

• A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, 2005

Screen adaptations:

• A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, 2007

• The Princess of Nebraska, 2007

Today, as always, San Francisco epitomizes

cosmopolitan spirit of freedom and preserves a mysterious aura about it,

being partly hidden

in a “heavy fog as wet as rain”

(Dashiell Hammet )