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The journeys on foot, horseback, and automobile of Jack and Charmian London through the blackened, twisted debris of earthquake country from Sonoma County to San Francisco to Oakland and later as far north as Fort Bragg and then back again to San Francisco produced both words and images that help define this country’s greatest urban disaster. Few others traveled so widely to see so much within so little time. They were witnesses for the world.
Like fin de siecle San Francisco, Jack London was at the peak of his fame and powers in 1906. Both had risen from humble beginnings to prosperity; both exhibited a certain amount of hubris in known earthquake country. San Franciscans had ignored the warnings of previous earthquakes and fires. After the San Francisco 1906 earthquake, London seems to have been more concerned with the delays in constructing his dream boat, the Snark, than with the destruction and rebuilding of three-quarters of a modern American city and what that meant to the survivors.
While London’s published words about the catastrophe in Collier’s magazine and other publications may have failed to convey the drama as poignantly as other written accounts, his photographs portrayed the true horror and extent of the catastrophe, particularly in the counties north of San Francisco where few other photographers ventured.
In the end, both the city and the man proved to be merely mortal. The city’s inhabitants were torn apart during the period of social corrosion following the disaster. London’s less obvious troubles ended with his death, at the age of forty, ten years later. The difference was that the city had the opportunity to rise from the ashes again and—most probably in future years—again and again.
Philip L. Fradkin
Guest Curator
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