![]() ![]() Ina Coolbrith circa 1871, when she was around thirty, before moving to SOMA from Nob Hill.īorn into Mormonism in Nauvoo, Ill., Coolbrith’s family left the faith in the early-1850s and crossed the plains to settle in Los Angeles. ![]() However, standing in front of her home, looking northward, one would have seen the south side of Russian Hill rising up in the near distance. Fact is, the parlor where the “Overland Trinity” converged, &c., was actually on Nob Hill, though the hill was not yet known by that name (in the 1860s, the closest hill name for where Coolbrith lived would have been Clay Street Hill). There was one, major detail in Tarnoff’s text, however, that had me digging into old directories and newspapers myself: where exactly was Ina Coolbrith’s 1860s home and parlor – that early sanctum of West Coast Bohemia – truly located? Early in, and throughout The Bohemians, Tarnoff again-and-again mentions its being on Russian Hill. This is not a review of Tarnoff’s book, though I found it thoroughly enjoyable. Coolbrith officially became California’s first poet laureate in 1919, and is the person I’m concerned with in this post. ![]() I just finished reading Ben Tarnoff’s The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers who Reinvented American Literature (Penguin, 2014) which follows Mark Twain’s time in San Francisco, his rise to fame, while interweaving the stories of Bret Harte, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Ina Donna Coolbrith. ![]()
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