920 O'Farrell Street

by Harriet Lane Levy

Overview

First published in 1947, Harriet Lane Levy’s autobiography, 920 O’Farrell Street, chronicles her childhood in an upper-middle-class San Francisco neighborhood during the mid-late nineteenth century—a period in which young women such as Levy were expected to marry well-off men, generating additional societal expectations. The intellectually inclined Levy was hesitant to marry early and instead took herself off to study at the University of California at Berkeley.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781787205369
Publisher:	Valmy Publishing
Publication date:	06/28/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	194
Sales rank:	1,025,313
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

HARRIET LANE LEVY (1867-1950) was a Californian writer best known for her memoir, 920 O’Farrell Street. She was also an avid art collector, a girlhood friend of Alice B. Toklas, and an acquaintance of Gertrude Stein.

Born into an upper-middle-class Jewish family and raised in San Francisco, she graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1886 and became a prominent writer for San Francisco publications, such as the San Francisco Call. She also wrote for The Wave alongside other notable writers such as Jack London and Frank Norris.

A passionate traveller, she visited Paris many times and resided there with Toklas for two years. In 1910, she resettled in San Francisco, at the age of 47, and continued to live independently by pursuing her intellectual interests, such as psychology and Christian Science.

She died in 1950.