Ben Tarnoff, Author, The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

Tarnoff's latest book focuses on Mark Twain's early years as a struggling writer in Civil War-era San Francisco and on the countercultural community he discovered there. It was a haven for weirdos, gamblers, crooks and draft dodgers, but later became a literary laboratory for new kinds of writing, eventually influencing several of the directions American literature went during the decades that followed.