Harriet Lane Levy

Who was Harriet Lane Levy?

Harriet Lane Levy is a California writer best known for her memoir, 920 O’Farrell Street. Levy was also an avid art collector, a girlhood friend of Alice B. Toklas, and an acquaintance of Gertrude Stein. She was born into an upper-middle-class Jewish family and raised in San Francisco. As the first part of her autobiography, 920 O’Farrell Street chronicles her childhood in an upper-middle-class San Francisco neighborhood. Additionally, young women such as Levy were expected to marry well-off men, which generated additional societal expectations. However, the intellectually inclined Levy was hesitant to marry early. Instead, she graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1886 and became a prominent writer for popular San Francisco publications, like the San Francisco Call. She also wrote for The Wave with notable writers such as Jack London and Frank Norris. Another one of Levy’s passions was traveling. She visited Paris many times, the first being with her friends Michael and Sarah Stein. She later returned to live in Paris with Toklas for two years. In 1910 she resettled in San Francisco, at the age of 47, continuing to live independently by pursuing her intellectual interests until her death in 1950.