San Francisco's Redwood Park is the setting for two Mark Twain inspired scenes in Nine Lives Last Forever. The park is tucked behind the TransAmerica Pyramid building, a few blocks away from Jackson Square. The center of the park features a fountain surrounded by bronze frogs, commemorating one of Twain's earliest writing successes, a short story called The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.

From Nine Lives Last Forever, Chapter 3:

"The outer struts of the Pyramid's massive concrete base flanked one side of the half-acre park, almost all of which shivered in the perpetual shadow of the building's cold lumbering mass. A formation of redwoods ringed the park, their long straight trunks rocketing skyward, racing against the Pyramid's pointed skyscraper to reach the warmth of the sun.

The vertical plumes of a fountain caught the few splashes of sunlight that filtered down to the ground level of the park. The statues of half a dozen gangly-legged frogs hopped amongst the fountain's stone lily pads, their bronze green-tinged legs outstretched, the wide span of their webbed flippers flying through the air.

The fountain's frogs were San Francisco's tribute to Mark Twain, who manned a newspaper desk in the downtown Montgomery Block building during the later half of the 19th century. In addition to providing office space, the Monkey Block, as it was affectionately called, also featured bars, restaurants, and, in the basement, a series of steam baths where Twain allegedly met a San Francisco firefighter named Tom Sawyer."

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