From yuppies to Harvey Milk via Jack London, here is your essential reading list for San Francisco travels – real or imaginary. These are some of our readers’ favourite books about the west coast cradle of bohemia, tech and groundbreaking literature

Some things can only happen in San Francisco. Few cities combine the magnetism of “start-up” entrepreneurship with being the perfect place for outsiders and seekers – and the literature set in the city reflects the creativity, convulsions and freedom that have shaped it. Whether you’re looking for a reading list to prepare, or accompany, a visit to San Francisco, or you’re simply in the mood to be driven to it through literature, look no further. Last week, San Francisco writer Anisse Gross took us through the fascinating literary history of the city where people emigrated to pursue not the American dream, but the dream of the west, “the limits of self‐expression and identity”. Do check her blog, with essential recommendations ranging from the Beats to Tales of the City – and here is what Guardian readers had to add. If your favourite is missing, please let us know in the comments.

1. The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth (1986)



Seth’s novel is written in verse – specifically, in a type of sonnet called the Onegin stanza, invented by Pushkin for Eugene Onegin – and it tells the life stories of a group of yuppies in 1980s San Francisco. Marriages, divorces, existential crises, friendships, corporate jobs, self-reinventions, family – the stuff of life, ultimately – intertwine in related, all explored in a beautifully unusual form as the narration follows protagonist John Brown.

Seth was a graduate student at Stanford University when, while researching for his dissertation, he came across Pushkin’s classic novel in verse, and realised that this was the form he wanted to use for his “tales of California”. This non-traditional novel did, according to supersplurk, “an excellent job in bringing the city and the mood of San Francisco in the 1980s to life”. It was also recommended by conedison and by Roopa Ganguli.

A sample San Francisco verse:



John notes the late September showers Have tinged the blond hills round the bay With a new green. He notes the flowers In their pre-winter bloom. The way That, when he was a child, the mystery Of San Francisco’s restless spark, It strikes him now as, through the park, Wrested from old dunes by the westward Thrust of the greenbelt to the slow Pacific swell, his footsteps go. But it is late. The birds fly nestward Towards the sunset, and the arc Of darkness drifts across the park.

2. The Mayor of Castro Street by Randy Shilts (1982)

“Still the go-to source for the story of Harvey Milk, but also an essential book about the city’s changing politics during the era [the 1970s], and one of the best political biographies of its decade,” said MrsBitch. Milk was a politician and gay rights activist who became the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California. He was dramatically assassinated almost a year later, in 1978. He is still a symbol for the emergence of gay power in America, and his life has been the subject of numerous books, films and documentaries.

In quotes from the book:



I have never considered myself a candidate. I have always considered myself part of a movement, part of a candidacy. I considered the movement the candidate.



Without hope, not only gays, but the blacks, the seniors, the handicapped, the us’es, the us’es will give up. And if you help elect to the central committee and other offices, more gay people, that gives a green light to all who feel disenfranchised, a green light to move forward. It means hope to a nation that has given up, because if a gay person makes it, the doors are open to everyone.

3. Homeboy by Seth Morgan (1990)

New York-born Seth Morgan based his debut novel, Homeboy, on experiences from his own life, including a prison stint and his discovery of the drug culture in San Francisco. The book gained praise upon its publication: the New York Times called it a “savagely comic and often brilliant’’ look at “the teeming San Francisco nether world of junkies, pimps, drag queens and hookers,” and dubbed Morgan “a Joycean Hell’s Angel.”

Morgan, who was the fiance of Janis Joplin at the time of her death in 1970, was imprisoned from 1977 to 1980 for armed robbery, and worked as a barker for striptease clubs in San Francisco before and after that. He said of writing Homeboy: “On my last legs, I hied down to New Orleans to quietly drink myself to death, and nearly did, but something awoke in me and I wrote a book instead.” He died on a motorcycle accident in 1990, shortly after its publication, and having signed a deal for a second book which was to be set in the Louisiana city. He was 41.

“He certainly lived the life he wrote about,” said peninsularguy, “including being a barker for San Francisco strip clubs. Quite apart from the San Francisco connections, a great read on its own terms.” It was also recommended by DJMC and Paul Moran.



In quotes from the book:

Okay fella, I’ve gone all day and haven’t thought of you once … then it just comes over me like a chill … remember the little things, like your voice so tough but pudding underneath and the way the tip of your tongue sticks out when you concentrate on things like tying a shoe or jacking a shot …



I seen that wanting to love, struggling for it, is more real than just loving. It’s deeper, stronger, more honest. The other’s too easy and cheap. For cheap, easy people … Our kind has to suffer.

San Francisco can’t be understood without the context of the entire Bay Area, and there’s a whole different urban universe on the other side of the bay, as dancer123 reminded us:

Mostly focused on Berkeley and Oakland, the East Bay gets less attention. Jack London and Gertrude Stein are natives, as well as Credence Clearwater Revival (although they’re actually from El Cerrito – a suburb of Berkeley). Stein referred to Oakland: “There is no there there.” People have been ignoring it ever since. It’s now attracting newcomers, as hipsters are priced out of San Francisco by Googlebus millionaires – a west coast Brooklyn perhaps.

A good introduction to the Oakland/Berkeley border is Michael Chabon’s recent Telegraph Avenue, with which “you get something of each” – the title references an avenue that runs through both cities. This is a multi-generational comic novel set in the mid-2000s and with interests as disparate as discussing Tarantino characters and challenging America’s attitudes to race.

In quotes from the book:

Most of all, he was tired of being a holdout, a sole survivor, the last coconut hanging on the last palm tree on the last little atoll in the path of the great wave of late-modern capitalism, waiting to be hammered flat.

All the anger that Gwen had been feeling, not just today or over the past nine months but all her life – feeding on to it like a sun, using it to power her engines, to fund her stake in the American dream – struck her for the first time as a liability. As purely tragic. There was no way to partake of it without handing it on down the generations.

5. John Barleycorn by Jack London (1913)

John Barleycorn, Jack London’s most autobiographical book, was a fictional dissection of his alcoholism and a reflection upon how society enabled drinking. In the novel, the title of which was inspired by a British folk song, London professed his love for alcohol, but he also wrote it as a tract against the dangers of addiction (he was highly influenced by the suffragettes he had met in New York). One of America’s most famous authors at the time, London’s book would be used in campaigns for prohibition. It was recommended by DJMC.

In quotes from the book:



There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. He is the type that gives rise to the jokes in the funny papers.

This strength John Barleycorn gives is not fictitious strength. It is real strength … But it is manufactured out of the sources of strength, and it must ultimately be paid for, and with interest.

See also his San Francisco stories.

6. Whores for Gloria by William T. Vollmann (1991)



A fascinating insight into San Francisco’s famously shady Tenderloin district, Whores for Gloria is a novel about a Vietnam veteran who becomes an alcoholic and devotes all his resources to search for a prostitute he once loved and who may or may not be imaginary. The New York Times said of it: “The strength of Mr. Vollmann’s novel, its poetry, its humanity, lies in the portraits of the prostitutes, transvestites and pimps who people the sidewalks of the Tenderloin district. And what a gallery of rogues it is.” It was recommended by CarlRusso.

In quotes from the book:

Sunglasses make the world quieter and safer, as if you are viewing things behind smoked windows fronting your skull-house: you are inside and the world is outside, and the world cannot see into you; mirror sunglasses double the armor.

For we all must build our worlds around us, bravely or dreamily, as long as we can we shelter ourselves from the rain, walling ourselves in gorgeously.

7. San Francisco Noir: The City in Film Noir from 1940 to the Present by Nathaniel Rich (2005)

We couldn’t miss a book about the city’s huge role in film history. It has been used as a location for endless films and, according to peninsularguy, the book is an “absolute delight from start to finish. Quite staggering to realise the number of (key) noirs set in San Francisco, from The Maltese Falcon to Point Blank via Vertigo, and full of obscure detail like the wardrobe connection between Vertigo and Basic Instinct”. If you’re in the lookout for hundreds of film trivia, this is for you.

See also Footsteps in the Fog, specifically about Hitchcock’s use of the city and Bay Area locations for his films.



8. All Over Coffee by Paul Madonna (2007)

In 2004, artist and writer Paul Madonna started publishing All Over Coffee, a mix of comics, poetry and art, in the San Francisco Chronicle. The “strip”, as he called it – a comic strip without the comic – depicts the city and its inhabitants in an original, thoughtful way, and has all been compiled into a book. In the words of Dave Eggers, “the architecture of residential San Francisco is about detail, wilful eccentricity, an almost rococo approach to line, and a steadfast devotion to art for its own sake, beauty as its own reward. Paul Madonna’s work gives itself fully to all of these notions, and to the city as a whole, and in doing so reminds us why, block by block and view by view, this is one of the most beautiful cities in the world.” Recommended by hureharehure.

Virtual Light, the first book in the trilogy.

9. The Bridge trilogy by William Gibson



This trilogy by acclaimed science-fiction writer William Gibson is comprised by Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), and All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999). In a (then) future year 2006, the series starts with an earthquake in California, which would divide the state into two, and it explores the advancement of cyberspace technology and nanotechnology. The title references the Bay Bridge, which in the story is abandoned and becomes an improvised place of shelter. It’s also set in Tokyo.

It was recommended by Cheryl Morgan.



In quotes from the books:

They sat around accessing media all day and talking about it, and nothing ever seemed to get done. —All Tomorrow’s Parties

You could buy a burrito there, a lottery ticket, batteries, tests for various diseases. You could do voice-mail, e-mail, send faxes. It had occurred to Laney that this was probably the only store for miles that sold anything that anyone ever really needed; the others all sold things that he couldn’t even imagine wanting. —Idoru

10. Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas by Rebecca Solnit (2010)

A “sublime” book, according to aerialmeg, Infinite City is “a collaborative atlas of San Francisco, including essays and maps ranging from Monarch butterflies to Hitchcock’s films to blues clubs, and makes a terrific guide map to the city’s possibilities”, in the words of writer Anisse Gross.

One of the maps from Infinite City ... “Third Street Phantom Coast depicts how the city’s waterfront has expanded streams, shell middens and 19th century landmarks. Photograph: Rebecca Solnit

Extra notes

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Joan Didion’s essay collection Slouching Towards Bethelem features two essays about the city – with pearls like this:

I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder.

Did we miss your favourite? Please add it in the comments. Next up: Los Angeles.