“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.

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WORKS CITED

[In order of mention.]

 

Francine Prose. 1974: A Personal History. New York: Harper, 2024.

 

Francine Prose. “Scent of a Woman’s Ink.” Harper’s Magazine, June 1998.

 

Francine Prose. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read.” Harper’s Magazine, September 1999.

 

Francine Prose. “Seeing Our Selves.” The New York Review of Books, October 10, 2014.

 

Isaac Babel. Red Cavalry and Other Stories. Translated by David McDuff. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.

 

Isaac Babel. The Complete Works of Isaac Babel. Translated by Peter Constantine. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.

 

Francine Prose. “After Dark.” Lapham’s Quarterly, Winter 2019: Night.

 

James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice, 1879–80. Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Emily L. Ainsley Fund.

 

Michel de Montaigne. What Do I Know? Essential Essays. Translated by David Coward. Introduced by Yiyun Li. London: Pushkin Press, 2023.

 

Francine Prose. “Signs and Wonders.” Lapham’s Quarterly, Summer 2020: Epidemic.

 

Francine Prose. “That Gummy Jungle.” Lapham’s Quarterly, Spring 2021: Friendship.

 

Tim Burton, dir. Ed Wood. Touchstone Pictures, 1994.

 

Lewis H. Lapham and Henry A. Kissinger. “The Letters of Lewis H. Lapham and Henry A. Kissinger,” Harper’s Magazine, November 2024.

 

Joan Didion. “Slouching Toward Bethlehem.” In Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

 

The Pentagon Papers: The Secret History of the Vietnam War. New York: Racehorse, 2017.

 

Alfred Hitchcock, dir. Vertigo. Paramount Pictures, 1958.

 

Bernard Herrmann. Vertigo (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack). Varèse Sarabande, 1996.

 

Marcel Proust. Swann’s Way. Translated by Lydia Davis. New York: Penguin Classics, 2004.

 

Marcel Proust. Swann’s Way. Translated by James Grieve. New York: New York Review Books, 2023.

 

Rod Serling, creator. The Twilight Zone. CBS, 1959–64.

 

Herman Melville. Bartleby, the Scrivener. In Melville’s Short Novels. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.

 

Francine Prose. Judah the Pious. New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2013.

 

The Blue Mosque at Mazari Sharif.

 

Howie Michels. Epic. A Hug from the Art World, New York City, September 15–October 29, 2022.

 

Deborah Eisenberg. “A Cautionary Tale.” In The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. New York: Picador, 2010.