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From the crest of the hilltop at Mountain View Cemetery into the redwood groves at Joaquin Miller Park, through the enviable homes (some original, some rebuilt after the firestorm) nestled in the bosom of the hills, into the hardscrabble flatlands, the gritty industrial vista girded by chain-link fence and razor wire, right down to the gray water’s edge: Everywhere you go in Oakland, there’s literary heritage.

To wit: "It’s almost impossible to avoid Jack London if you live in Oakland," says T-Bird, the main character in Eric Miles Williamson’s East Bay Grease. "Jack London Square, Jack London Park, posters and pictures of Jack London in the bookstores and museums, the books by London you read in elementary school, junior high, high school ... And even if there’s no physical evidence of London, people tell stories about him as if they know him personally, as if they’d gotten hammered with him and stormed the town. He seems to loom over everyone like an accusation."

Indeed, even fictionally, London, among many literary lights, looms large over Oakland. In Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring, protagonist Benjamin "Chappie" Puttbutt is a professor at the fictional Jack London College, and London makes at least a cameo appearance in practically every significant work of fiction set in Oakland. Is it possible to imagine Oakland sans London? The author and journalist did leave his stamp on this city, and Oakland left its stamp on him. A run through the pages of his autobiography, John Barleycorn, takes the reader immediately into the roughneck world of Estuary oyster pirates and life on the Oakland docks. "I little dreamed that the time would come when the Oakland waterfront, which had shocked me at first, would be shocked and annoyed by the deviltry of the things I did," London writes. Then he recalls, "Can I ever forget the afternoon I met ‘Old Scratch’…? It was in the Last Chance. Johnny Heinhold introduced us."

Heinhold’s First and Last Chance Saloon (48 Webster St.), is still standing leaning at an alarming tilt over the Estuary. You can step right into living history and order up a beer with the ghosts of London and his cronies. Built from the remnants of a whaling ship, the First and Last Chance Saloon is a historic landmark several times over that hosted not only London and Oakland poet Joaquin Miller, but also Robert Louis Stevenson and poet George Sterling, among other luminaries. A few yards away is the reconstructed log cabin that London occupied in the Yukon in 1897 while searching for gold and writing, drinking and freezing.

And what of that other rake, Joaquin Miller? His literary claims are dubious (his contemporary, San Francisco writer Ambrose Bierce, famously called Miller "the greatest liar this country has ever produced;" Miller called himself "the Byron of the Rockies"). His poetry is not exactly brilliant. However, it’s suitable to expressing his sentiments about his adopted home, California, in particular the Oakland Hills. He built a home called The Abbey, which you can see at the edge of Joaquin Miller Road, and enjoyed his last years in the hills among second-growth redwoods and the many eucalyptuses he planted in what is now Joaquin Miller Park. The property, which he called "The Hights" (his spelling), offered him views of the Bay and beyond; he expresses his delight over the golden hour of twilight in late summer, as only we in the Bay Area know it, in language we can fully comprehend in his poem, "Twilight At The Hights": "Come under my oaks, oh drowsy dusk!/The wolf and the dog; dear incense hour/When Mother Earth hath a smell of musk,/And things of the spirit assert their power …"

Today, if you walk around Joaquin Miller Park you’ll find the various monuments he made to himself and to his favorite authors. Woodminster Amphitheater and its cascading waterfalls, built by the Work Projects Administration, were dedicated in 1941 as a memorial to California writers "to inspire and advance the noble aims of mankind," as the plaque says at the site. The trees around Woodminster are designated as the Writers Memorial Grove, and individual plantings are dedicated to California’s great authors, including Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Dashiell Hammet, Ina Coolbrith (Oakland’s first librarian and mentor to London; the 23rd Street branch library was once named for her) and many others.

Coolbrith is buried at Mountain View Cemetery not too far from Frank Norris, a Progressive-era author whose novels McTeague and The Octopus were early catalysts for social change. If you want to tour Oakland’s literary sites, you have to pause at Norris’ grave and Coolbrith’s memorial marker.

And while there are many places still extant where the literati loitered in Oakland, it’s also nice to step into the pages of novels set in this city, to settle into some fine prose and soak in the atmosphere that we know so intimately: See the dusty herbal-shop windows of Chitra Divakaruni’s Mistress of Spices, where her street scenes depict an Oakland all too familiar. "Turn the crooked corner of Esperanza where the Oakland buses hiss to a stop and you’ll see it … looped letters that say Spice Bazaar faded into a dried-brown mud …" Feel the palpable longing of Reed’s character Puttbutt, who craves success and a grand house to prove it: "[H]e lived at the bottom of the Oakland Hills. On Ocean View near Broadway. But one day he would be up there. One day he would join Oakland’s affluent political, intellectual and artistic aristocracy. Up there."

Jonathan Letham’s adventure, The Fortress of Solitude, pauses at "Bosun’s Locker" on Shattuck at 58th where superhero/ antihero Aeroman takes down a ne’er-do-well in a series of misadventures. Aeroman is known thereafter as "The East Bay Avenger," lauded and scolded for his vigilantism. If you pop into Dorsey’s Locker (5817 Shattuck Ave.), watch out for reluctant superheroes, and order up some soul food. (Check out their Afrocentric Spoken Word open mic events, too, while you’re in a literary mood.) Then swoop down by bicycle around Lake Merritt by evening, hike in the veldt-brown hills or catch up with the Oakland A’s, the way protagonist Julia does in Dashka Slater’s novel, The Wishing Box. And relive this 1989 moment with her: "Silence. Then the house began trembling. The room shuddered, shifted, and then quieted. I bolted for the doorway and stood with my arms braced against the frame … A second later the shaking started again, a swiveling wave that sent books and lamps sliding from the nightstand."

In The Fifth Book of Peace author Maxine Hong Kingston also relives one of Oakland’s darkest hours: October 1991, when her house and novel-in-progress burned to ash. "It was the middle of the afternoon. Too late. Too late. The sky was black. The sun was red. Leaves of burned black paper wafted high and low among the buildings. Ashes from a forest fire were falling and blowing in downtown Oakland."

The more we read, the more a part of our place we feel. This is us, our setting, our home, these flats, these hills. And it’s all connected—when we look at Jack London and feel he’s out of touch and too long ago, we need only glance at the new works of hiphop noir authors like Nichelle D. Tramble or Jess Mowry or slip into Leonard Chang’s mysteries to know our literary heritage is alive and as vibrant today as it’s ever been. This is Oakland. Read all about it.