Charles A. Gunnison

Charles A. Gunnison was an American author born in California in 1861 and associated with San Francisco. A Stanford catalog record for his journals identifies him as Charles Andrew Gunnison and describes diaries from 1881 to 1887 that capture his daily life in San Francisco, his friendship with Timothy Hopkins, and travels in Europe and Asia.

Those travels seem to have shaped his writing. Calisphere notes that he toured through Europe from June 1881 into late 1882, especially in Austria and Germany, and later references connect him with San Francisco and Macao. Online bibliographic records credit him with works including Though Given in Vain, In Macao, The Beautiful Eyes of Ysidria, and A Napa Christchild; and Benicia's Letters.

He died in San Francisco in 1897. While little biographical detail appears to survive in widely available sources, the record that remains points to a writer whose fiction and journals were closely tied to travel, place, and the cultural world of California in the 1880s and 1890s.