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Bay Window Bohemia
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
Hardcover
First published June 1, 1983
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About the author
Oscar Lewis
262 books41 followersOscar Lewis was born in New York City in 1914, and grew up on a small farm in upstate New York. He received his PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in 1940, and taught at Brooklyn College and Washington University before helping to found the anthropology department at the University of Illinois, where he was a professor from 1948 until his death. From his first visit to Mexico in 1943, Mexican peasants and city dwellers were among his major interests. In addition to The Children of Sanchez, his other studies of Mexican life include Life in a Mexican Village, Five Families, Pedro Martinez, and A Death in the Sanchez Family. He is also the author of La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York, which won the National Book Award, and Living the Revolution: An Oral History of Contemporary Cuba, with his wife, Ruth Maslow Lewis, and Susan M. Rigdon. Lewis also published widely in both academic journals and popular periodicals such as Harper’s Magazine. Some of his best-known articles were collected in Anthropological Essays (1970). The recipient of many distinguished grants and fellowships, including two Guggenheims, Lewis was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He died in 1970.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 3, 2022
Fusty, musty, dusty, and I loved it.
Found this one years ago at a junk sale in San Francisco, then lost it somewhere through the years of vagabonding.
Ordered a used copy because I wanted to see its quaint, artistic cover again, and trip into the ‘zest and sparkle’ of the SF’s yesteryear, with its ‘ample facilities by which those so inclined might indulge their gross or lusty appetites….where ‘residents were encouraged to throw off their inhibitions and enjoy themselves to the full…in a moral and intellectual climate that fostered an appreciation of sensual pleasures.’
As one who lived in pre-tech saturated San Francisco off and on for a decade, I can heartily and heart-achingly attest that that is true!
The stately grace of the prose complements the book’s solemn undertow of mortality: All of the artists and writers are long dead here. But Lewis chronicles them fondly, giving each their due in humorous anecdotes and illuminating descriptions.
Here he is on the singular Frank Norris:
‘As the decade of the 1890’s opened, there enrolled in the freshman class at the University of California across the bay a twenty-year-old youth who—understandably enough—stirred up no little curiosity, plus a certain amount of derision, on the part of his fellow students. For both in appearance and manner the newcomer failed by a wide margin to conform to the conventions of the time and place. A slender, frail-appearing youth, his pale face sporting a wispy mustache and neatly-trimmed sideburns, he had an indubitably foreign look that set him apart. Moreover, his garments, form-fitting coat, spats, and brightly colored waistcoat, bore an elegance that inevitably were looked on as foppish by his less resplendent classmates. His behavior, too, set him apart, being reserved and decorous, and even his speech had a preciseness and formality rarely heard on the free-and-easy western campuses.’
Norris himself would be proud of this riff I wager. We should all be so lucky.
Found this one years ago at a junk sale in San Francisco, then lost it somewhere through the years of vagabonding.
Ordered a used copy because I wanted to see its quaint, artistic cover again, and trip into the ‘zest and sparkle’ of the SF’s yesteryear, with its ‘ample facilities by which those so inclined might indulge their gross or lusty appetites….where ‘residents were encouraged to throw off their inhibitions and enjoy themselves to the full…in a moral and intellectual climate that fostered an appreciation of sensual pleasures.’
As one who lived in pre-tech saturated San Francisco off and on for a decade, I can heartily and heart-achingly attest that that is true!
The stately grace of the prose complements the book’s solemn undertow of mortality: All of the artists and writers are long dead here. But Lewis chronicles them fondly, giving each their due in humorous anecdotes and illuminating descriptions.
Here he is on the singular Frank Norris:
‘As the decade of the 1890’s opened, there enrolled in the freshman class at the University of California across the bay a twenty-year-old youth who—understandably enough—stirred up no little curiosity, plus a certain amount of derision, on the part of his fellow students. For both in appearance and manner the newcomer failed by a wide margin to conform to the conventions of the time and place. A slender, frail-appearing youth, his pale face sporting a wispy mustache and neatly-trimmed sideburns, he had an indubitably foreign look that set him apart. Moreover, his garments, form-fitting coat, spats, and brightly colored waistcoat, bore an elegance that inevitably were looked on as foppish by his less resplendent classmates. His behavior, too, set him apart, being reserved and decorous, and even his speech had a preciseness and formality rarely heard on the free-and-easy western campuses.’
Norris himself would be proud of this riff I wager. We should all be so lucky.
September 23, 2009
A completely amazing book of stories, reminiscences and legends from 1890s San Francisco, this book reads like a sourcebook for fiction writers wishing to rip off the esteemed Mr. Lewis and, purportedly, history itself. No sawed-off shotgun required.
This is not the sordid, purposefully sensationalist history of The Barbary Coast by Herbert Asbury -- which I loved, but which reported bizarre drunken barroom raving as fact, whereas this reports only mildly buzzed gaslit tearoom conjecture as fact. Bay Window Bohemia also concerns itself less with the criminal element -- though that's covered a bit -- and more with the generally outrageous-slash-puritanical character of San Francisco, and with the life of arts and letters as the 1890s saw it.
The book was originally published in 1956. The foreword of the later paperback reprint edition I read is by Kenneth Starr, the official historian of the California state government and an estimable writer.
This is not the sordid, purposefully sensationalist history of The Barbary Coast by Herbert Asbury -- which I loved, but which reported bizarre drunken barroom raving as fact, whereas this reports only mildly buzzed gaslit tearoom conjecture as fact. Bay Window Bohemia also concerns itself less with the criminal element -- though that's covered a bit -- and more with the generally outrageous-slash-puritanical character of San Francisco, and with the life of arts and letters as the 1890s saw it.
The book was originally published in 1956. The foreword of the later paperback reprint edition I read is by Kenneth Starr, the official historian of the California state government and an estimable writer.
Want to read
March 10, 2015
July 28, 2018
A fun, charming retrospective of San Francisco's cultural history, focusing on the period from the 1890's through the earthquake. Covering much the same ground as Samuel Dickson's Tales of San Francisco, it keenly made me feel that I was born one hundred years too late.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews