Herb Caen

Who was Herb Caen?

Herbert Eugene "Herb" Caen was a San Francisco journalist whose daily column of local goings-on and insider gossip, social and political happenings, painful puns and offbeat anecdotes—​"a continuous love letter to San Francisco" —​appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle for almost sixty years and made him a household name throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

The secret of Caen's success [was] his outstanding ability to take a wisp of fog, a chance phrase overheard in an elevator, a happy child on a cable car, a deb in a tizzy over a social reversal, a family in distress and give each circumstance the magic touch that makes a reader an understanding eyewitness of the day's happenings.

A special Pulitzer Prize called him the "voice and conscience" of San Francisco."