Matthew J. Davenport
Matthew Davenport’s first book, “First Over There,” a finalist for the 2015 Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, was acclaimed as “a brilliant work for every library” in a starred review from Library Journal and was heralded by Pulitzer-Prize winning historian James McPherson as “military history at its best.” His forthcoming book, “The Longest Minute,” the gripping, true story of the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906 in San Francisco, is scheduled for release from St. Martin’s Press in Fall 2023.
Matthew Davenport has been a contributing writer for the Wall Street Journal Book Review and salon.com and is a member of the Authors Guild. A native of Missouri and a former prosecutor, he practices law in North Carolina where he lives with his wife and two sons.
The Longest Minute
At 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck San Francisco, catching most of the city asleep. For approximately 48 seconds, shockwaves buckled streets, shattered water mains, collapsed buildings, crushed hundreds of residents to death and trapped many alive. Fires ignited and blazed through dry wooden ruins and grew into a firestorm. For the next three days, flames devoured collapsed ruins, killed trapped survivors, and destroyed what was then the largest city in the American West.
Meticulously researched and gracefully written, The Longest Minute is both a harrowing chronicle of devastation and the portrait of a city’s resilience in the burning aftermath of greed and folly. Drawing on letters and diaries and unpublished memoirs and previously unearthed archival records as well as interviews with engineers and geologists, Matthew Davenport combines history and science to tell the dramatic true story of one of the greatest disasters in American history.