![]() ![]() Twain gets the most page time, but is the least delicately handled Tarnoff reserves his affection for the city itself and its “community of fellow misfits” who, drawing on the unique energy of young California and the language, humor, and mythology of the West, create a “native national literature, liberated from the cultural imperialism of the Old World.” While the revolutionary claims are ambitious-Twain’s jumping frog of Calaveras County is “the Fort Sumter of American letters,” his The Innocents Abroad “a bullet in the heart of America’s literary establishment”-Tarnoff thoughtfully situates the rise of “a unique American vernacular” in a confluence of economic, geographic, and historical forces. Tarnoff’s (A Counterfeiter’s Paradise) glimmering prose lends grandeur to this account of four writers (Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Ina Coolbrith) who built “an extraordinary literary scene” in the frontier boom town of 1860s San Francisco. ![]()
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