Born near Third and Brannan Streets in San Francisco. The house where i was born burned down in the fire after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.My mother and i were deserted by my astrologer father, William Henry Chaney. Because my mother, Flora, was ill, i was raised through infancy by an ex-slave, Virginia Prentiss, who would remain a major maternal figure. Late in 1876, Flora married John London, a partially disabled Civil War veteran. The family moved around the Bay area before settling in Oakland.In 1886 i made my first trip to the Oakland Public Library and met a sympathetic librarian, Ina Coolbrith (who later became California's first poet laureate and an important figure in the San Francisco literary community).I read Ouida's long Victorian novel Signa, which describes an unschooled Italian peasant child who achieves fame as an opera composer. This as the seed of my literary aspiration.
