Reading American cities: books about San Francisco

Younger and smaller than most great American cities, San Francisco has a rich cultural heritage. Annisse Gross picks out the literary landmarks of this west coastal city, from its first newspaper chroniclers to the Beats and beyond

What are your favourite books set in or about San Francisco? Let us know in the comments, and we’ll feature them in next week’s readers’ list

I started sketching out this post at the counter of a bar overlooking the San Francisco Bay, where where ships flocked and docked during the Gold Rush of 1849, transforming the city from a peaceful place of fewer than a thousand people into a melee of wild‐eyed prospectors and raucous opportunism.

It’s true that people have often come to this place in a search of wealth, but many have also come to escape or reinvent themselves. No matter the purpose, it seems everyone comes to San Francisco on the heels of a whisper, with a sense of possibility. With a surface area of only about 49 square miles, it is is both younger and smaller than most American cities, yet it holds claims to some of America’s most important literature.

Many of the best observations about this city are from authors who were passing through, like Oscar Wilde

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