Word: frontierisms
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...FRANCISCO'S LITERARY FRONTIER-Franklin Walker-Knopf...
...challenger of New York's financial might, a cultural threat to Boston. That year San Francisco went on a three-day spree. Officially it celebrated completion of the transcontinental railroad-"Uncle Sam's Waistband-He would burst without it." Historically it celebrated the end of a unique frontier society, an equally unique frontier literature...
This week that teeming literature is celebrated in a 425-page volume called San Francisco's Literary Frontier. An absorbing book, it contains a big cast, centring on Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Joaquin Miller. But at least a dozen of its 45 secondary and minor characters are as interesting if not as important as these. They shuttle in & out of a narrative brightened by anecdote, distinguished by excellent writing, weighted by a shrewd understanding of frontier social forces. The six-year work of a 37-year-old professor of English at San Diego State College, San Francisco...
After 1850 Western mines produced an average $50,000,000 a year in gold and silver. That golden figure is the key to the uneven lives and works of San Francisco's frontier writers. With few exceptions, gold brought them West. Gold brought the sophisticated, cosmopolitan population, the wealth and leisure that make readers, writers and publishers. Because gold was elusive, restlessness and skepticism became a familiar literary tradition. Because male Argonauts outnumbered female twelve to one, traditions of rough-&-ready humor and violence grew apace...
Gold gave San Francisco 13 dailies, several times as many weeklies, literary journals which flourished without advertising. These combined serious poems with miners' correspondence, frontier burlesque and tall tales with such polished articles as "An Epitome of Goethe's Faust," pirated novels such as Bleak House with condensed news columns called "Eastern intelligence." ("One of the pioneers of Washoe, James A. Rogers, blew his brains out, September 2nd. Cause: discouraged...