On April 18th, 1906, a titanic earthquake jarred the citizens of San Francisco awake, not long after dozens of small fires burned. Three of those fires grew, eventually destroying over five hundred square blocks of the fabled city by the Golden Gate. 
Many of the survivors, rendered homeless, were forced to live in ill-prepared tent camps where shortages, government ineptitude, and corruption ruled the day. 'Never Stop Looking Down the Road' is a work of historical fiction telling the story of eight of the survivors, the hardships they endured during the three days and nights in which the city burned. Strangers, starting over, in a barren polo field in Golden Gate Park, the economic and social structure of the city forever changed. An old buffalo soldier brings hope by simply looking down that road for opportunity.

Never Stop Looking Down the Road

Literature & Fiction

Smith, Sherman L

Dramas & Plays

Sherman Smith

GOLDEN CITY on FIRE, authored by Sherman Smith is a historical bone-chilling recount of San Francisco's most traumatic even, the 1906 devastating earthquake. Brilliantly written, Smith generates his research into riveting sentences sweeping the reader into the midst of hysteria and chaos as a small band of strong minds manage to keep their wits while all others are losing their sanity. ..".sorry I didn't bring a cake" is uttered as a simple calming honest birthday wish between two souls while all around them the trembling city explodes unto cinder and shatter, mangle and char falling to heaps of debris in the streets cutting off avenues and boulevards to floating in the bay clogging waterway escape. "It's hard to compartmentalize death and move on as if nothing had happened..." Sentence after sentence, page after page the reader is swept into the scene caught up as a victim, a survivor, a policeman, fireman, giggling children playing a simple kick-the-can game while a hungry man grilles fish on flame as parents "stare with frightened little animal eyes..." Maybe you are Lavinia, hurt and seemingly alone... "the heat and the smoke caused her vision to waver- a black and white dream with yellowish-orange undertones. All she knew was that she did not want to be where she was and that she really didn't know where that was." Sherman Smith vividly paints a portrait of mass humanity overcome to madness yet for a few giant professionals who manage to cling and build on their inner strength as they rise to grasp control in the face of overwhelming disarray. At the heart of this book glows love and compassion as in this scene of a China woman kneeling serenely at Lavinia's feet applying ancient comfort easing injury. "She closed her eyes not seeing or feeling the tiny needles the old woman inserted into her leg and foot." A monumental tome of historical value, GOLDEN CITY on FIRE should be in every library.

Golden City on Fire

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Thrillers & Suspense

Poets Can't Sing

Smith, Sherman

Genre Fiction

San Francisco, 1950: The residents of the Honeysuckle Rose Hotel - musicians all - are a quirky bunch each with their secrets, addictions, sins of their own making, traumatic issues that weigh down upon their shoulders, nightmares from the past, or dreams of things the way they ought to be. Earl Crier, a blind, bluesy crooner, is their heart and soul, until one day when a policeman sees a tall black man mugging - hugging a blind white man on the front steps of the hotel, this house of cards begins to fall. As the blues man falls silent can the Honeysuckle Rose survive?

Silencing the Blues Man (Poets Can't Sing)

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Books by Sherman Smith