George Sterling

George Sterling (December 1, 1869 – November 17, 1926) was an American poet and playwright based in California who, during his lifetime, was celebrated on the Pacific coast as one of the great American poets, although he never gained equivalent success in the rest of the United States.

Sterling was born in Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York, the eldest of nine children. His father was Dr. George A. Sterling, a physician who determined to make a priest of one of his sons, and George was selected to attend, for three years, St. Charles College in Maryland. He was instructed in English by poet John B. Tabb. His mother Mary was a member of the Havens family, prominent in Sag Harbor and the Shelter Island area. Her brother, Frank C. Havens, Sterling's uncle, went to San Francisco in the late 19th century and established himself as a prominent lawyer and real estate developer. Sterling eventually followed him to the West in 1890 and worked as a real estate broker in Oakland, California. With the publication of his small volume of poetry in 1903, The Testimony of the Sun and Other Poems, he quickly became a hero among the East Bay literati and artists, some of whom included Joaquin Miller, Jack London, Xavier Martinez, Harry Leon Wilson, Perry H. Newberry, Henry Lafler, Gelett Burgess, and James Hopper.

In 1905 Sterling moved 120 miles south to Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, an undeveloped coastal paradise, and soon established a settlement for like-minded Bohemian writers and other children of the counterculture. A parallel colony of painters was also developing in this enclave. Carmel had been discovered by Charles Warren Stoddard and others, but Sterling made it world-famous. His aunt Mrs. Havens purchased a home for him in Carmel Pines where he lived for nine years. In addition to the Bay Area residents mentioned above, Sterling managed to attract, as either visitors or semi-permanent residents, the satirical iconoclast Ambrose Bierce, novelist Mary Austin, art photographer Arnold Genthe, writer Clark Ashton Smith, and poet Robinson Jeffers. When a firestorm of controversy followed Sterling’s publication of A Wine of Wizardry in the Cosmopolitan magazine of September 1907, other rebels flocked to Carmel, including Upton Sinclair and the MacGowan sisters. What attracted so much attention in the press were the stories (both fictional and true) of nude beach parties, free sex (including homosexual), wife swapping, opium dens, and the spate of suicides. The most notorious was the painful and prolonged suicide by poison of the popular poet Nora May French in Sterling’s own home. Reports of French’s nymphomania and the numerous male lovers just prior to her death scandalized the public. The suicide of Sterling’s wife by cyanide only added fuel to the flames. Sterling’s own diaries and correspondence reveal a more sedate, but still Bohemian community. He often volunteered at Carmel’s Forest Theatre and once played a starring role in Mary Austin’s play The Fire. He is depicted twice in Jack London's novels: as Russ Brissenden in the autobiographical Martin Eden (1909) and as Mark Hall in The Valley of the Moon (1913).

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