This document provides an overview of San Francisco's literary and cinematographic history. It discusses famous authors like Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, Allen Ginsburg who wrote about San Francisco. It mentions hotels like The Palace that hosted famous visitors. It summarizes works set in SF like The Maltese Falcon and Vertigo. It highlights Chinese American authors Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston who wrote novels adapted into films set in the city. In conclusion, it notes SF continues to symbolize freedom and maintains a mysterious aura.

1. Evgenia Butenina
eve-butenina@yandex.ru
The Literary and
Cinematographic
San Francisco in an
American Literature
Classroom

2. “The coldest winter I ever saw was
the summer I spent in San
Francisco”
From LIFE magazine, Aug. 9, 1883

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

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

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

6. Platt's Hall
welcomed Hans Christian Andersen, Sir Conan Doyle, Walt
Whitman, Agatha Christie, and many other famous
lecturers

7. San Francisco's Natives:
Jack London's plaque

8. Well's Fargo Bank Building

9. 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.

10. Robert Lee Frost
1874–1963
“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’ ”

11. Allen Ginsburg’s Sunflower Sutra
I 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

12. The Maltese Falcon, 1941

13. Vertigo, 1958

14. The Conversation, 1974

15. Bijou Cinematic Hotel

16. 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…”

17. Amy Tan (b. 1952)
The Joy Luck Club,
1989

18. The Joy Luck Club, 1993
• Directed by Wayne
Wang
• National Board of
Review Award, 1993
• Nominated for Best
Adapted
Screenplay, 1994

19. 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

20. 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 )