The Seacoast of Bohemia
Near Carmel, California
For a few electric years in the early twentieth century, this sleepy village became one of the great artist colonies in America, a place a writer nicknamed the seacoast of bohemia. It began with a poet. George Sterling, tall and hawk faced, the self styled king of bohemia, arrived in nineteen oh five and lived in a tent while he built his house.
He was the closest friend of the novelist Jack London and a protege of the acid tongued writer Ambrose Bierce. Then came the fire. On the eighteenth of April, nineteen oh six, the great San Francisco earthquake shattered the city, and refugee painters, poets, and dreamers fled south to Carmel.
By nineteen ten a newspaper reported that roughly sixty percent of the townsfolk did work connected to the arts. The writer Mary Austin, author of The Land of Little Rain, moved here and wrote in an elevated treehouse she called the Wickiup, after the dwellings of the Paiute. Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, and Upton Sinclair all passed through this circle of mussel bakes, bonfires, and endless talk.
They came for cheap land and open coast, and they left behind a village that still believes, stubbornly, that beauty is worth protecting.
