Every March when I was growing up, my grandmother grew sprouts for the Persian New Year, and a feeling of renewal would fall over the house. In a life thousands of miles away from the home we’d left and still imagined we’d return to one day, this was the first ritual with which we observed […]

Born in a small town in 1907, a flame-haired teenaged Gladys Parker hightailed it to New York City to study illustration in the 1920s. She was a quick study. Her “Flapper Fanny” and “Mopsy” comic strips embodied the verve and insouciance of the new generation. But that was just the beginning. To kick off her […]

“One night, a jazz-crazy sixteen year-old San Francisco girl put a pistol to her sleeping mother’s head. . .” Even if you’ve read The Bohemians, you probably don’t remember this line, but it’s one of many true stories embedded in the novel–stories I couldn’t tell at length, but that were just too striking, and in this […]

Originally published in Messy Nessy Chic In 1934, a young woman stepped off the train in Los Angeles’ Union Station. Even in a city swarming with beauties, eyes would’ve fastened on her. She was astonishingly lovely — tall and lithe, with dark glossy hair she wore pulled back in a style that offset her porcelain […]

Anne Brigman was a pioneer who made no distinction between her artistic practice and her quest for freedom. Beginning in 1901, nearly two decades before Lange arrived in California, Brigman was regularly trekking up to the Sierra Nevada, photographing herself on the edge of a cliff like a swaggering buccaneer, or else posing nude in […]

Once upon a time, San Francisco had its own Harlem, and this Harlem had a queen. A “fast-talking,” “show-me-what-you-can-do” woman, one-part glamour and a million parts grit. Her name was Leola King and she got her start running a barbeque pit at 1601 Geary Street. An homage to King’s native Oklahoma, it was built out […]

He was a painter, she was a photographer. The year was 1920 and the place was San Francisco. They got married in her studio, took a four-day honeymoon, and settled into their first house. The house was a refugee shack, slapped together in a day in the weeks that followed the 1906 earthquake. The shacks […]

Hiding in plain sight all over Northern California, the Bruton sisters must be one of the art world’s best-kept secrets of the last century. Theirs is the story of three brilliant, prodigious artists who created art of exceptional beauty and enduring resonance; the story of three women who dared to trespass the boundaries of social […]

She was feted atop the Great Pyramid in Egypt. She danced for the heads of state of nine countries. Duels were fought over her. Songs composed. A besotted Jack London immortalized her in literature. At the height of her career, she was one of the highest-paid entertainers of her day, introducing Spanish dance to audiences […]

“I wanted to go and be free.” In the early 1900s, an original Bay Area Bohemian hightailed it to the High Sierras, where she tossed aside fussy Victorian dresses in favor of britches and boots, and spent her days climbing mountains with her dog Rory, a few of her women friends, and her camera and […]

Recently I had a chance to talk with Anya Groner about The Bohemians. It was one of my all-time favorite interviews! You can read the full exchange here on the Ploughshares Blog. AG: I’ve always thought of Dorothea Lange as a working-class photographer, an impression garnered from her portraits taken during the Dust Bowl Migration […]

Quick—what’s your image of a flapper? A young woman with bobbed hair slinking into a speakeasy, throwing back a cocktail and dancing the Charleston? You’d be right, but did you know she’d likely also be carrying a doll? It’s true. Along with all the other shenanigans for which the 1920s are now famous, the decade […]

“That year, every metropolitan city, from Paris to London, was caught in an Orientalist fever called Japonisme.” When Dorrie comes to San Francisco in The Bohemians, she’s startled by City’s embrace of all things Japanese, and wonders how it squares with the prejudice she sees against the Chinese. Like many of the most puzzling details […]

A force—there’s just no other way to describe her. How else can you account for the roster of guests Mabel Dodge Luhan drew to a remote New Mexican town in the early 1900s: Georgia O’Keeffe, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Willa Cather, Dorothy Brett, Ansel Adams, Maynard Dixon and Dorothea Lange? Born an heiress in Buffalo, […]

If ever a city and a man were made for each other, it was San Francisco and Sadakichi Hartmann. Like the character he played in the 1924 film The Thief of Baghdad, Hartmann was a kind of court magician to successive bohemian circles all over the world. In The Bohemians, he amuses and mystifies a […]

When he was a San Franciscan, Maynard Dixon strode through the streets each morning in a tailored black suit, black Stetson hat, and black cape. He was tall and very slender, with a long face, blue eyes, and blue-black hair. “Walks like a deer,” someone once observed, which would have been true if deer went […]

By force of time, but also immigration, my family’s lost many things. Some we’ve thrown away. But photographs, never. Ten years ago, when my mother began her descent into dementia, I became the custodian of the family photographs. I’ve boxed them up and taken them wherever I move, the way the ancients traveled with their […]

“Pretty Women Motorists Arrive After Trip Across the Continent,” read the San Francisco Chronicle headline in August 1909. The article referred to a group led by twenty-two-year-old Alice Huyler Ramsey, the first woman to drive across the country. Just a few months earlier, Ramsey’s driving skills had caught the attention of a representative from the […]

“San Francisco is very beautiful,” a 23-year-old Frida Kahlo wrote to her mother in the autumn of 1930. “Our way here was also very beautiful. For the first time I got to see the Ocean, and I loved it! The city is in a beautiful location, from everywhere you can see the sea. The bay […]

Note: This essay was originally published on Literary Hub. When I moved back to the Bay Area, where I’d grown up, in 2013, I could barely recognize whole swaths of San Francisco anymore, but one part of it, North Beach, was almost exactly the same. More than ever, spending time there had the feeling of […]