Nick Romeo has written for Rolling Stone, The Atlantic and many other publications his most recent book is "Driven: Six Incredible Musical Journeys. But without the exuberant atmosphere of the city in its early days, we might not remember him at all. The members of the San Francisco Bohemian circle gradually drifted apart, and Twain was the only one to achieve lasting fame. We smell the "sharp odor of sagebrush" and taste Twain's "lager beer and Limburger cheese" in Nevada. He has a talent for selecting details that animate the past. Tarnoff powerfully evokes the western landscapes, local cultures and youthful friendships that helped shape Twain. Respected authors tended to scorn the subscription model its reputation was similar to that of self-publishing today. Even "The Innocents Abroad," which reached a wide readership, did so by means of a subscription model in which salesmen went door to door hawking the book to readers. When Twain managed to get his first book published, it flopped. But over the course of the 1860s, Twain and the other Bohemians were discovering that local materials could be the stuff of a national literature. In 'The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature,' Ben Tarnoff explores Twain's formative years as a young writer in San Francisco in the 1860s and. Many intellectuals still considered Twain and other Western writers hopelessly primitive: Although they were good for a laugh, serious authors emulated European models.
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