116 Facts About George Sterling

George Sterling was an American writer based in the San Francisco, California Bay Area and Carmel-by-the-Sea.

George Sterling was considered a prominent poet and playwright and proponent of Bohemianism during the first quarter of the twentieth century.

George Sterling's works were published in nearly all American literary magazines, in more than a hundred newspapers, in anthologies, and in his own books.

George Sterling wrote about a vast variety of topics in different poetic styles that evolved throughout his writing career.

At age 26, San Francisco business executive George Sterling became obsessed with a new passion.

George Sterling wanted to write serious poetry inspired by his poetic heroes such as John Keats and Edgar Allan Poe.

George Sterling wrote his first poems after his February 1896 marriage.

George Sterling knew eminent literary critic Ambrose Bierce and asked permission to send him poems for evaluation.

Between 1897 and 1901, George Sterling wrote many poems but, usually dissatisfied, let only a handful become published.

For thirteen years Bierce reviewed and commented on George Sterling's poems, teaching his protege poetic skills and shaping his artistic preferences.

The unusual poem was too long for magazines and was rejected by book publishers, so in 1903 George Sterling self-published it in his first book, The Testimony of the Suns and Other Poems.

When his book was released, George Sterling's poems had been published in newspapers and magazines for seven years, but "The Testimony of the Suns" marked the first time George Sterling's poetry attracted nationwide attention from critics.

In December the Bohemian Club asked George Sterling to write a play for its 1906 Midsummer Jinks.

George Sterling took it to the Bohemian Club members responsible for the Jinks.

In 1910 and 1911, George Sterling began to consciously evolve his style and subjects.

George Sterling has a rare perception of that thing which we call Beauty.

George Sterling's poems appeared in national publications American Magazine, Bookman, Century, Current Opinion, Everybody's Magazine, Harper's Monthly, Hearst's International, North American Review, Saturday Evening Post, and other magazines, and were reprinted by the Washington Post and other newspapers across the country.

George Sterling submitted an ode to Robert Browning, and out of hundreds of poets who entered, won second place.

George Sterling received a cash award of almost $8,000 in today's money.

Meanwhile, George Sterling sold his poetry for the first time to the prestigious magazine The Smart Set, one of the most irreverent and influential literary magazines of its time.

George Sterling wanted the event to rouse and enthuse his attendees.

Henry Anderson Lafler and George Sterling were hired to write an inspiring musical play.

George Sterling created two Stone-Age characters, a boy and a girl.

George Sterling introduced them as 10-year-old cave kids, then worked them through a series of six stories as they grew into a young man and woman.

George Sterling hoped to sell poems and stories to New York publishers.

George Sterling met a few friends in New York, but did not sell many poems or stories.

In February 1914 George Sterling had written a short play, The Flight, for Bay Area social club the Family to present in the summer.

George Sterling sold a few to magazines, but only for low prices.

In spite of George Sterling knocking on New York editors' doors during 1914, the national magazines that bought his poems were mostly publications he'd already sold to in prior years.

That month George Sterling wrote his second poem about the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

The last days of 1916 saw a different kind of Sterling publication: a songbook Songs by George Sterling had music by Lawrence Zenda.

When Songs was published, George Sterling was in Los Angeles working on a play.

George Sterling's adaptation was staged in 1941 in New York City.

For months George Sterling had called for the United States to join the Great War to support the Allies.

George Sterling joined a pro-war group of writers called the Vigilantes, pledging to write pieces to support Allied efforts.

At Alexander Robertson's request, George Sterling gathered 28 of his war poems for a new book, The Binding of the Beast and Other War Verse.

Back in 1916, Bohemian Club managers had told George Sterling they wanted him to write the Club's grove play for 1918.

George Sterling wrote Lilith: A Dramatic Poem, a four-act fantasy verse drama from 1904 to 1918.

On March 23,1920, George Sterling announced he had finished the first draft of a historical play, Rosamund.

George Sterling self-published 500 numbered, hand-signed copies of Rosamund: A Dramatic Poem.

George Sterling reviewed each letter and deleted unfavorable references to living people and passages he felt made Bierce look bad.

George Sterling helped the Book Club's secretary, Bertha Clark Pope write an introduction, and himself wrote "A Memoir of Ambrose Bierce" for the book.

George Sterling went through five of his earlier books and selected 56 poems.

George Sterling made more than a hundred changes to the texts of the poems.

Some of it, to be sure, is on the cosmic order, but even here when Mr George Sterling is good he is very, very good.

George Sterling wrote Truth, a verse drama telling a fantasy set in the imaginary medieval city of Vae, in 1921 and 1922.

George Sterling began 1924 in Hollywood, working on a project for movie star Douglas Fairbanks, who produced his own movies.

Fairbanks was producing and starring in the spectacular action-fantasy The Thief of Bagdad, and wanted George Sterling to write more than 200 titles for the three-hour film.

George Sterling signed a contract with Fairbanks' company to create a book of songs about The Thief of Bagdad, to be sold in movie theaters showing the movie.

George Sterling wrote lyrics and composer Mortimer Wilson wrote music, but no songbooks were printed.

In 1924, fourteen George Sterling poems were published in eleven national magazines.

In 1925, the Book Club of California published Continent's End: An Anthology of Contemporary California Poets, which George Sterling had edited with Genevieve Taggard and James Rorty.

George Sterling used his position to promote several younger poets, beginning his first monthly column by praising Jeffers and Clark Ashton Smith.

One key poem George Sterling wrote in 1925 was not published until 1926.

George Sterling completely rewrote his 1923 play Truth, transforming it into the Bohemian Club's summer 1926 stage spectacle.

When George Sterling died November 17,1926, he left behind many uncollected or unpublished works: dozens of essays, "seventy-odd short stories," and hundreds of poems most readers had never seen.

All but three of those poems were written from 1921 through 1926, making After Sunset even now 85 years later the only George Sterling collection focused on the more modern poems George Sterling wrote in his final years.

Thomas Benediktsson, for his 1980 book George Sterling, did read After Sunset, but mistakenly assumed that that 43-poem collection contained Sterling's entire "body of uncollected verse," unaware of more than five hundred additional uncollected poems written by Sterling.

George Augustine Sterling III was born December 1,1869 in Sag Harbor on Long Island, New York.

The new mother, Mrs Mary Havens George Sterling, was the daughter of Captain Wickham Sayer Havens, a legendary whaler who retired rich and became a banker.

In 1886, George Sterling's father shocked his Episcopal friends by converting to Roman Catholicism.

Dr George Sterling wanted his three sons to become Roman Catholic priests, beginning with his oldest.

High school graduate George Sterling agreed to enter a six-year seminary program at St Charles College in Maryland.

Twenty-year-old George Sterling arrived in Oakland, California the night of September 30,1890.

George Sterling moved into his uncle Frank's estate near Oakland, Rosecrest, surrounded by the largest rose gardens in the west.

George Sterling worked his way up to bookkeeper in Havens' headquarters on Sansome Street in San Francisco by the summer of 1891.

Now Johnson persuaded George Sterling to visit Miller's nearby hilltop estate.

In May 1895, George Sterling began the cash book for Frank Havens' new Real Estate Combine.

George Sterling was one of the Realty Syndicate's seven founding directors.

On February 7,1896, George Sterling married his private stenographer, Caroline "Carrie" Eugenie Rand.

Dr Sterling sold his family home in Sag Harbor to Frank Havens and moved cross-country with George's mother and six sisters into Havens' Rosecrest estate.

When London met him, George Sterling was the corporate secretary of both the Real Estate Combine and the Piedmont Development Company, the auditor of the Realty Syndicate, and a member of the boards of directors of the Realty Syndicate, the Oakland Transit Company and other corporations.

George Sterling found a house for London and his wife Bess at below-market rent.

In February 1902, George Sterling found a bigger place for the Londons on Blair Avenue in Piedmont, even closer to the George Sterling home.

In early 1903, George Sterling was appointed vice president of the Real Estate Combine.

Jack London finished a draft version of a new novel, and impressed by George Sterling's writing abilities, asked him to suggest improvements.

Also that year George Sterling self-published his first book, The Testimony of the Suns and Other Poems, which generated nationwide acclaim.

In 1904 George Sterling was named the Real Estate Combine's chairman of the board.

George Sterling was invited to join the Bohemian Club and worked to have the club admit Jack London as an honorary member.

In January 1905, George Sterling stepped down as the Real Estate Combine's chairman, but remained its vice president and a member of its board.

George Sterling decided to quit his business career and become a full-time poet.

George Sterling wanted to move out of the San Francisco Bay Area and its distractions.

George Sterling showed them nearby sights, including a forested artists' colony, population 75, with white sand beaches.

In George Sterling's words, "Wood was a 'boss carpenter' under his father, in Vancouver".

George Sterling became the first of many Sterling friends to follow him to Carmel, building a larger Craftsman house nearby that copied some features of the Sterling home.

The Sterlings needed the "indecently large" pay, so for the next five years George continued to work for Havens' corporations, most months spending one to three weeks at work in San Francisco or Oakland and the rest of his time in Carmel.

George Sterling encouraged classically-trained singer and pianist Mabel Gray Lachmund Young to move to Carmel.

George Sterling planted two acres of potatoes, peas, and other crops, but he was not a successful farmer.

George Sterling's soil was not fertile, and cows knocked down his fences to eat his crops.

George Sterling was more successful getting food by fishing, especially shellfish such as mussels, crabs, and abalone, and by hunting.

George Sterling recorded in his Carmel Diaries shooting hundreds of birds and animals.

Some George Sterling friends moved permanently to Carmel in 1906, including novelist Mary Austin and writer James Hopper with his wife and children.

In January 1907 George Sterling was elected corporate secretary of the Piedmont Development company and treasurer of the Real Estate Combine.

The biggest three personal events during 1907 for the Sterlings were the nationwide scandal over Sterling's "A Wine of Wizardry", Sterling's mentor Ambrose Bierce visiting in August, and, while George was in Oakland, the suicide of young poet Nora May French in the Sterlings' Carmel home.

On July 16,1908, George Sterling was toastmaster for thirty-two members of the club for the first annual breakfast at its clubhouse.

Later he would become the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, but in 1909 Lewis wanted to meet his idol George Sterling and learn how to be a writer.

George Sterling got Lewis a job with the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, and later helped him sell short-story ideas to Jack London.

George Sterling regularly harvested enough abalones to hold abalone feasts for his friends, often on the "Cooke's Cove" beach, a block away from the MacGowan sisters' house on Thirteenth Avenue.

George Sterling made their task fun by writing "The Abalone Song" for them to chant in rhythm as they pounded.

George Sterling promised to abstain, but soon was visibly drunk again.

In 1910 Frank Havens and his partner Francis M Smith were dividing their jointly-owned empire of corporations, so Sterling spent most of January, February, and April away from Carmel, working on the split.

George Sterling had committed several infidelities in Carmel, but there is no record of others this blatant.

George Sterling got Connolly pregnant; she had a miscarriage or an abortion.

George Sterling thoroughly enjoyed visiting his boyhood town and his uncle's lavish hospitality.

George Sterling visited her frequently and they seemed to get along well together.

For nearly six months they tried to live together, but eventually Carrie told George Sterling she wanted a divorce.

George Sterling says it's neither my fault nor hers; if it's anyone's it's mine, as I'm sure I should have written more and drunk less.

Finally, Lila decided Carrie should divorce George Sterling and start life over again.

Eight years after the Sterling's moved into their Carmel dream house, George gave it to Carrie in their divorce and moved out of the bungalow.

George Sterling moved back to San Francisco and into the Bohemian Club.

Except for trips to Hollywood to write plays and movies and one more successful stay in New York, George Sterling lived for the rest of his life in the Bohemian Club.

In 1918, a wealthy patron offered to pay for George Sterling to take a long trip to New York City.

George Sterling met old friend photographer Arnold Genthe and new friends poet Bliss Carman, novelist Theodore Dreiser, socialist reporter John Reed, poet Harry Kemp, and novelist Nina Wilcox Putnam.

In New York, George Sterling packed his bags and took a train to California "as soon as I could after receiving that shocking news," he told Upton Sinclair.

George Sterling died by suicide in his room at the Bohemian Club; his body was discovered on November 17,1926.

The single George Sterling poem that most influenced other writers was "A Wine of Wizardry".