The Summer of Love was a social phenomenon that occurred during the summer of 1967, when as many as 100,000 people, mostly young people sporting hippie fashions of dress and behavior, converged in San Francisco's neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury. More broadly, the Summer of Love encompassed the hippie music, hallucinogenic drugs, anti-war, and free-love scene throughout the West Coast of the United States, and as far away as New York City.
A hippie, also spelled hippy, especially in British English, is someone associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to different countries around the world. The word hippie came from hipster and was used to describe beatniks who moved into New York City's Greenwich Village, in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, and Chicago's Old Town community. The term hippie was used in print by San Francisco writer Michael Fallon, helping popularize use of the term in the media, although the tag was seen elsewhere earlier.
Armistead Jones Maupin, Jr. is an American writer notable for Tales of the City, a series of novels set in San Francisco.
Boonville is a census-designated place (CDP) in Mendocino County, California, United States. It is located 12.5 miles (20 km) southwest of Ukiah, at an elevation of 381 feet. The population was 1,018 at the 2020 census.
Wilbur Addison Smith was a Zambian-born British-South African novelist specialising in historical fiction about international involvement in Southern Africa across four centuries.
Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. Since 2011, he has taught creative writing at Pomona College.
Zyzzyva is a triannual magazine of writers and artists. It places an emphasis on showcasing emerging voices and never before published writers in addition to the already established. Based in San Francisco, it began publishing in 1985. ZYZZYVA's slogan is "The Last Word," referring to "zyzzyva", the last word in the American Heritage Dictionary. A zyzzyva is an American weevil. The accent is on the first syllable.
Robert Mailer Anderson is an American novelist, screenwriter, playwright, Grammy-nominated producer and activist. He is the author of the bestselling novel Boonville, which takes place in the Northern California town of Boonville, and the 2016 play The Death of Teddy Ballgame. He is a contributor to the Anderson Valley Advertiser. Anderson is a three-time San Francisco Library Laureate and in 2016 he was presented the San Francisco Arts Medallion for his outstanding leadership in the arts. In August 2020, Anderson was appointed to the California Humanities Board of Directors by Governor Gavin Newsom.
Andrew Sean Greer is an American novelist and short story writer. Greer received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel Less. He is the author of The Story of a Marriage, which The New York Times has called an “inspired, lyrical novel,” and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named one of the best books of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and received a California Book Award.
Ramón Sender Barayón is a composer, visual artist and writer. He was the co-founder with Morton Subotnick of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1962. He is the son of Spanish writer Ramón J. Sender.
Michelle Tea is an American author, poet, and literary arts organizer whose autobiographical works explore queer culture, feminism, race, class, sex work, and other topics. She is originally from Chelsea, Massachusetts and was identified with the San Francisco, California literary and arts community for many years. She currently lives in Los Angeles. Her books, mostly memoirs, are known for their exposition of the queercore community.
Tom Spanbauer is an American writer whose work often explores issues of sexuality, race, and the ties that bind disparate people together. Raised in Idaho, Spanbauer has lived in Kenya and across the United States. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches a course titled "dangerous writing". He graduated in 1988 from Columbia University with an MFA in Fiction and has written five novels.
Martin Moritz Thomsen Titus (1915–1991), known as Moritz Thomsen, was an American writer, farmer and Peace Corps volunteer. He worked and wrote in the small town of Rio Verde, Ecuador. His books have been praised by writers such as Paul Theroux, Thomas Cahill and Larry McMurtry.
Chronicle Books is a San Francisco-based American publisher of books for adults and children.
Dean Rader is an American writer and professor who teaches at the University of San Francisco, in the Department of English, where he has also served as department chair. Rader holds a M.A.and Ph.D. in comparative literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton where he studied translation, poetry, visual culture, and literary studies. He is primarily known for his poems that mix high and low art and his scholarly work on Native American poetry.
Joel Selvin is an American San Francisco-based music critic and author known for his weekly column in the San Francisco Chronicle, which ran from 1972 to 2009. Selvin has written books covering various aspects of pop music—including the No. 1 New York Times best-seller Red: My Uncensored Life In Rock with Sammy Hagar—and has interviewed many musical artists. Selvin has published articles in Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, Billboard, and Melody Maker, and has written liner notes for dozens of recorded albums. He has appeared in documentaries about the music scene and has occasionally taken the stage himself as a rock and roll singer.
Samuel Barry is an American author, columnist, publishing professional, and musician.
Meredith Maran is an American author, book critic, and journalist. She has published twelve nonfiction books, several of them San Francisco Chronicle best-sellers, and a successful first novel. She writes features, essays, and reviews for People, More, Good Housekeeping, Salon.com, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Boston Globe.
Joanna Rakoff is an American novelist and memoirist.
Shawna Yang Ryan is a Taiwanese-American novelist, short story writer and creative writing professor, who has published the novels Water Ghosts (2009) and Green Island (2016) (Knopf). She currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.
