San Francisco has inspired some of the finest American literature. The city's literary history runs from Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled detective fiction through the Beat Generation explosion at City Lights Books to Armistead Maupin's tales of bohemian reinvention -- and it has never really stopped. Few cities have been written about so well, or so lovingly.
Howl and Other Poems — "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness..." Ginsberg first read Howl at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in October 1955, and the poem detonated like a bomb. Published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books in 1956, it was seized by customs and put on trial for obscenity -- a trial that made both the poem and the bookshop famous.
You can still buy Howl at City Lights on Columbus Avenue, in the same North Beach neighbourhood where Ginsberg, Kerouac, and the Beats drank and argued and reinvented American poetry. The poem is short enough to read in a sitting. Do it before you visit.
Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas — Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City is not a conventional atlas. Each of its maps overlays two or three unexpected datasets -- shipwrecks and Zen Buddhist centres, butterfly habitats and cinemas, queer bars and murders -- revealing the invisible cities layered beneath the surface of the one we see. It is a love letter to San Francisco in the form of cartography.
The maps are beautiful, the essays that accompany them are sharp and illuminating, and by the end you will see the city in a completely different way. A perfect book to carry on a trip -- it makes you want to go looking for the layers Solnit describes.
Tales of the City — The first in Maupin's nine-novel series, Tales of the City follows the interlocking lives of the residents of 28 Barbary Lane -- a fictional address inspired by Macondray Lane on Russian Hill. Originally serialised in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1978, the novel captures a city of boundless reinvention: newcomers finding themselves, old San Francisco colliding with new, and a landlady named Mrs. Madrigal who may not be exactly who she seems.
It is funny, warm, occasionally heartbreaking, and the single best book for understanding the spirit of San Francisco in the years before AIDS changed everything. Read it and you will want to walk every street Maupin describes.
The Joy Luck Club — Amy Tan's debut novel tells the intertwined stories of four Chinese immigrant women and their American-born daughters in San Francisco. Through mahjong games and family dinners, the mothers share stories of the China they left behind -- war, loss, secrets -- while their daughters navigate the gulf between their parents' world and their own.
Set largely in San Francisco's Chinatown and the Richmond District, The Joy Luck Club is a beautiful, sometimes devastating exploration of what gets lost and what survives between generations. Published in 1989, it remains one of the essential San Francisco novels.
The Maltese Falcon — Dashiell Hammett lived in San Francisco and set his masterpiece on its streets. Private detective Sam Spade navigates a web of lies, murder, and double-crosses as he tracks down a jewel-encrusted falcon, and Hammett's terse prose makes the city itself feel like a character -- the fog, the apartment hotels, the steep hills, the waterfront.
Published in 1930, The Maltese Falcon practically invented the hard-boiled detective genre. You can still walk past Hammett's apartment on Post Street and John's Grill on Ellis Street, where Spade ate lamb chops in Chapter 18. The restaurant keeps a Maltese Falcon replica on display upstairs.