George Sterling (December 1, 1869 – November 17, 1926) was an American writer based in the San Francisco, California Bay Area and Carmel-by-the-Sea. He was considered a prominent poet and playwright and proponent of Bohemianism during the first quarter of the twentieth century. His work was admired by writers as diverse as Ambrose Bierce, Robinson Jeffers, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Clark Ashton Smith. Life and career Sterling was born in Sag Harbor, 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. His aunt, Mrs. Havens, purchased a home for him in Carmel Woods where he lived for six years. Artist Charles Rollo Peters and Robinson Jeffers were influential in Sterling's move to Carmel. 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. 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, and writer Clark Ashton Smith. 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