In this captivating discussion, Francine Prose, author of 22 novels including *1974: A Personal History*, dives into her nostalgic memories of Nixon-era San Francisco. She reflects on vibrant communal living and the pre-tech spirit of the city, contrasting it with the current landscape. Prose shares her idealistic youth, from protesting the Vietnam War to her husband’s audacious climb of the Pentagon. She also explores the eerie parallels between her experiences and themes in Hitchcock's *Vertigo*, weaving a narrative rich in cultural and personal transformation.
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Francine's San Francisco Arrival
Francine Prose fell in love with San Francisco's vibrant, diverse culture after moving from Cambridge.
She felt a sense of belonging among the city's unconventional and charming inhabitants before the tech boom.
insights INSIGHT
Student Movements' Political Impact
The student movement played a significant role in drawing attention to and contributing to the end of the Vietnam War.
Current political attacks on universities aim to suppress anti-authoritarian student movements that challenge power.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Tony Russo's Complex Legacy
Prose knew Tony Russo was radical and unstable but was drawn to his charm and ideals.
Russo's marginalized legacy contrasts with Ellsberg's more polished public image representing the Pentagon Papers.
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This book is based on seventy hours of interviews with Franz Stangl, who was the commandant of Treblinka, one of the largest Nazi extermination camps. Gitta Sereny delves into Stangl's life and motivations, exploring how an ordinary man became involved in mass murder. The book also includes interviews with Stangl's wife and survivors of Sobibor and Treblinka, providing a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the Holocaust and its perpetrators. Sereny's meticulous approach sheds light on the psychological and moral complexities of those involved in the atrocities, making it a crucial read for anyone interested in the Holocaust.
Cautionary Tales
Piers Anthony
Cautionary Tales by Piers Anthony is a collection of stories and essays that fearlessly explore unusual subjects and challenge social and religious mores. The book includes provocative and imaginative tales that can be shocking, disturbing, yet thought-provoking, tackling themes such as love, religion, and sex. It is not for the faint of heart but offers a unique reading experience.
“I really loved it,” Francine Prose says of Nixon-era San Francisco in this episode of The World in Time, “but I also knew I wasn’t going to live there forever. Everyone I knew was living in these group houses in Berkeley, and then in the city itself, with ten people or fifteen people. I talk about the Reno Hotel, a former nineteenth-century hotel that had been built for boxers, and the city had given it to artists and designers and said, You can live there, don’t burn it down. And so they carved out these incredibly beautiful spaces for themselves. But this was before the tech revolution, when the Mission was still kind of wild and free, and it wasn’t all the glass cubes and people in tech. It was a great city to live in then. There was a kind of freedom there. Certainly compared to what I’d come from. My good fortune was that I wasn’t around a lot of hippies giving acid to two-year-olds. The book takes place during the Vietnam War. We went out and protested McNamara. My husband was the one who scaled the Pentagon, the walls of the Pentagon. We were very idealistic. Maybe unrealistically idealistic, but hey, I’ll take it.”
This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Francine Prose, author of 1974: A Personal History, about the San Francisco she remembers from her youth, about her relationship with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Tony Russo, about the final defeat of 1960s counterculture, and about the eerie echoes of Prose’s favorite movie, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly 
