Charles Caldwell Dobie

Biography

American novelist and historian Charles Caldwell Dobie was born in San Francisco, CA, in 1881. He had to drop out of grammar school at age 14 because of his father's death. He took a job as an office boy in an insurance company, and stayed with that company until 1915, when he began to make enough money from his writing to devote his full time to it. The majority of his work is about or set in his home town of San Francisco, where he spent his entire life (he never married). Both his fiction and non-fiction about his beloved city has been praised as "smooth" and "deftly written" by such literary figures as Carey McWilliams. Dobie died in San Francisco on January 11, 1943.