920 O’Farrell Street

Book excerpt: First published in 1947, Harriet Lane Levy’s autobiography, 920 O’Farrell Street, chronicles her childhood in an upper-middle-class San Francisco neighborhood during the mid-late nineteenth century—a period in which young women such as Levy were expected to marry well-off men, generating additional societal expectations. The intellectually inclined Levy was hesitant to marry early and instead took herself off to study at the University of California at Berkeley.