“By the time 22-year-old Kenneth Rexroth arrived in San Francisco in 1927, he had already developed a career as a professional bohemian and radical. Orphaned at a young age, he’d been living happily among the seedier elements of Chicago’s underground as a modernist painter, stage performer and poet, and using his natural born oratorical skills to soapbox for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Rexroth and his new wife, Andree, had arrived in San Francisco penniless and with no contacts whatsoever. … Rexroth’s home at 250 Scott Street, above Jack’s Record Cellar, became a magnet for this rapidly spreading mood of disaffection from American society, as all sorts of poets, artists, radicals, and notably conscientious objectors began to find each other and develop a common language and lifestyle in the Bay Area. … Eventually, Rexroth came to be regarded as something of a San Francisco institution. Out of the…