Ben Tarnoff reading & signing 'The Bohemians' - April 23rd

Time Tested Books

is proud to present

Ben Tarnoff

reading & signing his new book

The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco

Writers Who Reinvented American Literature
 

Wednesday, April 23rd, at 7:00pm

"In 1860s America, the Civil War destroyed old assumptions and rewarded radically new thinking. It triggered a cultural upheaval comparable to the Vietnam War, a national trauma that made an older generation suddenly obsolete and demanded novelty, innovation, experimentation. The 1860s was bloody, bewildering--and, if you managed to survive, a magnificent time to be a young American."

Thus begins Ben Tarnoff's enlightening and fascinating new book The Bohemians. Far from the front lines of the war, the city at the western edge of America roared with youth and promise. A global seaport, home to immigrants from five continents, San Francisco had become a complex, vibrant metropolis virtually overnight. The bards of the moment were the Bohemians: a young Mark Twain, fleeing the draft and seeking adventure; literary golden boy Bret Harte; struggling gay poet Charles Warren Stoddard; and beautiful, haunted Ina Coolbirth, poet and protectorate of the group. The Bohemians reveals how these four pioneering western writers would together create a new American literature--ironic, irreverent, and unfettered by the heavy European influence that dominated the Eastern U.S.

Ben Tarnoff has written for The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and Lapham's Quarterly. He is the author of A Counterfeiter's Paradise: The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Early American Moneymakers (Penguin/2011). He was born in San Francisco.

This event is FREE & everyone is invited.