July 2nd of this year, I took a Lyft round-trip from San Jose to Big Sur and back.

My driver was an immigrant from Vietnam, had lived in the Santa Cruz area for nearly his whole adult life but had never been to the Bixby Canyon Bridge.

As I gazed out over the Pacific, I had the distinct thought come to me, "You can do anything you want."

(Yes, I was probably in the midst of some low-level mania.)

Apparently, that was the day I entered this book into my queue. It seems à propos: did you know that Mark Twain was suicidal and debt-ridden when he was 29/30? That one of his closest friends was an ex-Mo woman who worked in a library for half the rate of her male peers?

I'm pretty sure I first picked this up in Boulder, in 2016, when I thought that I would move there and work at their Shakespeare festival and write a thesis on Ina Coolbrith and hike every morning.

I was at an English conference, which has diverged from the great American literary tradition sharply, in that it's mostly arguing about semiotics, and I skipped it to go to Avery Brewing in Gun Barrel.

That was the weekend the Comey letter hit.

That was the beginning of the end.

The nineteenth century was a period where melancholy, decades-long despair, the reality that you might just be single and trapped forever and ever, were very much a part of the fabric of a possible life, not something to be medicated or dismissed or manifested.

In my home stretch of this book, lying on the igneous benches on the East Bench of my hometown bursting randomly into tears (yes I was probably low-key depressed which to paraphrase Joan Didion seems like a reasonable response to 2018), having a description of Salt Lake City engraved by Mark Twain feet away seemed like a small slice of hope.

I was feeling particularly self-pitying about my parents (one dead, one absent) tonight, and snapped at the crisis worker or robot or whatever dystopia we live in (I had a cortado in San Francisco served by a robot, Twain, come save us from our stupidity) and thought about the Stoics' "Open Door" and their stance that if you don't throw yourself from the Golden Gate well, don't complain, you're in the game.

Unlike Ina, being an ex-Mo who's unencumbered by relatives, I should view it as a blessing in disguise.

Maybe I could find a literary community in San Francisco, pitch a memoir, take up the torch of flowery poetry as a singer-songwriter, talk my way into a consular job in Germany and never look back.

I left Great Salt Lake a good deal confused as to what state of things existed there and sometimes even questioning in my own mind whether a state of things existed there at all or not, said Twain. Suicidal or no, he certainly was sane and the writer we need in our blinkered age.

Maybe, just maybe, I Can Do Whatever I Want. ( )

Superb! I learned so much from reading this highly researched book. It's written in a fetching and literary style, easy to read, and the content makes it fascinating. How much do you know about the early days of San Francisco? What about Mark Twain and his formative writing years? Heard of Bret Harte, Ina Coolbrith, Charles Warren Stoddard? And if you know their works, what do you know about their personal lives?

For anyone interested in writers, this is a must read. For those interested in history, the book is an equally fascinating look at a period of the 1800s, both in the early days of the west and in the east. This is not only a lovely book but a real achievement. I can't imagine how long the research must have taken, so the author has made it easy for the rest of us to learn about this time period and this group of Bohemians.

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A fascinating biography of four giants in the post-civil war literary field. While there is a focus on each of four writers, the glue that holds them together is the developing western United States, particularly San Francisco. The other comprehensive mantel is the growth of the publishing industry, along with its successes and failures. I was surprised to discover the reasons for the high rates of literacy during the 1800s. Descriptions of the differences in the social fabric of the eastern and western United States made the book a worthwhile read. I had never considered the negative, presumably unintended, economic consequences of the connection by the railroad between east and west.

Mark Twain, or Samuel Clements, comes across as an unpleasant individual. Pleasure loving and economically dissolute during his pre-fame days, once famous he was not a people person. Loyal to his friends, such as Bret Harte, he did not seem to be interested in expanding his circle of friends. The Twain public persona was not reflected in the private one.

Bret Harte had an existence that started off with self-assurance which became increasingly greater as literary success came to him. And then the Muse left. His self-assurance never left although it seems his writing abilities had departed. Finally, there was the dependence on his sometimes friend, sometimes competitor Twain for Harte’s daily living expenses.

Ina Coolbrith, the female of the group, a poet, seemed to lead an almost wasted life that depended on the friendship and relationships to others in the group. Trapped in a life that some might consider domestic servitude, her professional artistic work was positively and critically acclaimed. It seems she spent much of her life waiting on either Charles Stoddard in person or letters from him, Twain and Harte.

Charles Stoddard, also a poet and appreciated by fellow poets such as Whitman, struggled with his homosexual existence in a time when if homosexuality were acknowledged, it was expressed in code words. He seemed to spend a lot of time fleeing to places where he could live his desired life without negative judgements by all around him.

In a book of approximately 325 pages, acknowledgements, notes, and an index start on page 255 (page numbers given in ebook editions). I shelved this one in my history (not historical fiction) collection of well referenced books.

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See full review @ The Indigo Quill: http://theindigoquill.blogspot.com/2014/04/review-bohemians-by-ben-tarnoff.html

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

A comprehensive account of prose writers Mark Twain and Bret Harte, and poets Ina Coolbrith and Charles Warren Stoddard. Ben Tarnoff tells us how this group interacted to create progression in literary history. Over time, the four bonded and were referred to as "The Bohemians" of San Francisco.

There was a lot of material compiled into this book, mostly focusing on Mark Twain. I was unaware of the connections between these four writers and how exactly their relationships impacted literature that we know today. Honestly, I wish he focused more on the other three writers and included a more unbiased view about Ina Coolbrith's life and intentions. It is often we find poets who were trouble, struggling, or soul-searching, but this has become a bit of a norm. I'm sure there's much more to this story.

If you know next to nothing about The Bohemians of San Francisco, this could bode as an interesting and enlightening read for you. The formatting was done fairly well, aside from some of the fonts around the photos. I liked how it mirrored a script-like handwriting, but it was at times difficult to interpret. ( )

ARC provided by NetGalley

Mark Twain has long been regarded as one of the voices of not only early America, but of modern America as well. Far ahead of his time Twain had an enormous impact upon American thought, life, and art after the Civil War and in the making of modern America. But he wasn’t alone in his efforts. In this book Ben Tarnoff describes how Twain, Bret Harte, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Ina Coolbrith interacted and were influenced by each other and how they helped shape american literature. Tarnoff does an excellent job of showing how they all met, influenced each other, and then became rivals. 3 out of 5 stars. ( )