Or was it just to close to the action of the Civil War and was he really a draft dodger? Why did Twain leave the Midwest for California? Surely he could have pursued his writing in Nevada, where he was living at the time. Ben Tarnoff has explored the history of the group in his book The Bohemians, Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers who Reinvented American Literature. Twain ended up being the most successful of the Bohemians, as the San Francisco quartet called themselves. The Gold Rush had ended but it had brought some interesting characters to the coast and Twain met three other writers: Bret Harte, Charles Warren Stoddard and Ina Coolbrith, who shared his interest in developing a literature different from the East Coast writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Herman Melville, who dominated American letters. California seemed like a place where one could experiment. Mark Twain arrived in San Francisco in 1863, during the American Civil War. (This story has been corrected from an earlier version.)
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