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.