san francisco in american literature and film
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TRANSCRIPT
Evgenia [email protected]
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 )