In order to gear up for my trip out West this August, I’m reading a book called San Francisco in Fiction: Essays in a Regional Literature. It is an anthology of essays about how San Francisco writers like Mark Twain, Jack London, Dashiell Hammet, Joan Didion, and Amy Tan, portrayed the city and the region. The great theme of this region is the search for new beginnings that its settlers bring with them from other American regions and foreign nations.
I have to share this passage from the essay about Frank Norris by Joseph R. McElerath, Jr. Norris wrote in particular about the bizarre urban life of San Francisco. The following description of a scene from The Octopus about the Midwinter International Exposition (similar to the famed Columbian Exposition that took place in Chicago in 1893) is just the sort of weird stuff that makes fin de siecle urban life sound like such a delirium.
[W]ithin the compound, one might also encounter a Japanese Tea Garden (which still survives), a life-sized elephant made of walnuts, an enormous wine bottle composed of wine bottles, a knight on horseback made to scale from prunes, and “native villages” inhabited by Eskimos, Hawaiians, and Africans imported for the occasion (University of New Mexico Press, 51).
June 22, 2009 at 4:14 pm |
cool. makes me want to check out frank norris!