Blindfolded

San Francisco before the fire: a young man steps off the train, is mistaken for someone else within the hour, and finds a fortune, a vendetta and a woman all attached to the mistake. Walcott edited the San Francisco Bulletin and the Overland Monthly, and wrote the city as a newspaperman knows it — Chinatown, the waterfront, the men who buy juries. Fifty-two plates by painters including Manet and Degas, from the theatre to the artist's studio, catch the city's duplicity in the years Walcott was writing it.