Reading Books on California

Quantifying art is odious, but we have to say the greatest California novels were written by John Steinbeck. Oh, c’mon, the man won the Nobel Prize for Literature — that has to count for something. Start with The Grapes of Wrath, as the Joad family flees the defeat of Dust Bowl Oklahoma only to find bitter disillusionment in the not-so-Golden State. Then visit with his oddly happy crew of lowlifes who hang around Monterey Bay’s Cannery Row.
Upton Sinclair didn’t get a Nobel Prize (despite the efforts of his admirer, George Bernard Shaw), but his Oil! is considered the great novel of 1920s Southern California. Hollywood Noir simply wouldn’t be the same without Philip Marlowe, the private-eye protagonist of Raymond Chandler’s detective novels such as The Big Sleep. His Northern California counterpart Dashiell Hammett brought the world Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (Spade worked in San Francisco). What does it say about the state when its most famous romantic figures are troubled loners? Anyone wanting to try his luck in Hollywood should be required to read Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locusts (because it rips the glitter off Tinseltown and shows the savagery beneath) and Bud Shulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? (featuring everyone’s favorite amoral, desperate agent Sammy Glick, role model for too many ambitious, if not particularly self-aware, Young Turks). Following in these footsteps is Michael Tolkein’s The Player, equally unsentimental about This Town and The Industry, to say the least. (At least Sammy Glick never killed anyone —that we know of.) If you ask him, however, Tolkein would say the best novel about Los Angeles is John Fante’s 1939 Ask The Dust, wherein yet another young writer gets his hopes and dreams crushed.
And while we are recommending downer (if brilliant) books, follow Los Angeles’s turbulent history and speculate on its future via Mark Davis’s City of Quartz. Relive some of the state’s most infamous (and brutal) moments with Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter (the best version of the Manson murders and the book most responsible for childhood nightmares among a generation), or one of the many books about San Francisco’s Zodiac Killer, L.A.’s Hillside Strangler, and, of course, O.J. One of the more famous and beloved pieces of modern fiction based in San Francisco is Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. If you’ve seen the miniseries, and especially if you haven’t, this is a must read for a leisurely afternoon — Maupin is a Dickens for his time. His 1970s soap opera covers the residents of 28 Barbary Lane (Macondry Lane on Russian Hill was the inspiration), melding sex, drugs, and growing selfawareness with enormous warmth and humor. A work of fiction featuring San Francisco during the Gold Rush is Daughter of Fortune by acclaimed novelist and Marin resident Isabel Allende. The tale begins in Chile and follows the life of Eliza, an orphan adopted by a proper English spinster and her brother. In love with a boy who has sailed for the gold fields, a pregnant Eliza runs away from home to search for the lad and is befriended by a Chinese doctor. Allende’s vivid depiction of life in California during the mid–19th century is one of the novel’s strengths.

Culinary taste of California

What are the factors that make California such a delightful place to dine (and grocery shop)? Location, location, location. No other state in the union cultivates like the Golden State; in fact, California’s farmers produce over half the country’s fruit and vegetables on just a measly 3 percent of its farmland. Almonds, olives, lemons, artichokes, all kinds of cruciferous and cabbagey vegetables, figs, dates, and truckloads of grapes and tomatoes are just some of the commercially produced goodies that thrive in the state’s mellow Mediterranean climate. But California’s cuisine is greater than the sum of its parts. Along with a rich pantry, immigration has affected what and how Californians and its visitors eat. In Northern California, the Gold Rush attracted an enormous number of Chinese from Canton Province, who stayed to work on the railroad and eventually settled into Chinatowns throughout the state.
Chinese eateries opened to feed the largely male population, but by the 1920s, adventuresome Anglos found it fashionable to give Chinese food a try, and soon you could sample chop suey in every city, big or small. In Southern California, Latino immigrants brought their influence to bear, introducing unfamiliar spices and changing the tastes of a population to such an extent that fast food today means tacos and burritos as much as hamburgers and fries. Los Angeles, in fact, can make its strongest claim to culinary fame (beyond the first and still champion celebrity chef, the highly influential Wolfgang Puck of iconic Spago in Beverly Hills) courtesy of its many hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurants. Reflecting the dozens (if not hundreds) of cultures that have settled in the area, the curious can nosh on Armenian, Nicaraguan, Oaxacan, Ethiopian, Issan Thai, Romanian, Hungarian, and more — a veritable United Nations of dining experiences, and many of them within just a few blocks of each other. And that’s not even discussing California rolls, which regrettably (in the minds of some purists) forever changed sushieating from a meditative consideration on a choice slice of fish to a circus stunt wrapped in seaweed. And Nancy Silverton’s La Brea Bakery, originally just a local bread shop, seems to have survived the low-carb phase just fine, bringing the gospel of artisanal bread to restaurants and supermarkets across the country.
Perhaps the greatest modern influence on how tuned-in Californians eat can be traced to food gurus such as Alice Waters. Her restaurant, Berkeley-based Chez Panisse, began as an outgrowth of Waters’s desire to feed her friends and became a philosophical training ground for many of today’s important chefs. Like French cooks — and Waters was profoundly changed by a year living in Paris — she is interested not in the quantity or cost of ingredients, but strictly in quality and freshness. In Berkeley, Waters created an infrastructure in which her restaurant is dependent on a cadre of small farmers, and vice versa. It wasn’t enough, however, to provide customers with the tastiest heirloom tomatoes and organic baby lettuces: the breads must be as delicious and fresh; the meats must be sourced from trusted ranchers; the cheese should complement the fruits and come from local producers as well. So along with a generation of restaurateurs, Chez Panisse inspired such robust local-artisan producers as Acme Bread and Cowgirl Creamery. California cuisine — which is really about showcasing the flavors of locally grown, seasonal bounty at its peak — has spread throughout and beyond California, thanks to Waters and to the chefs who have made her vision their own.

Post World War II California

World War II brought heavy industry to California, in the form of munitions factories, shipyards, and airplane manufacturing. In the 1950s, California in general, and San Francisco in particular, became popular with artists and intellectuals. The so-called Beat Generation appeared, which later inspired alternative-culture groups — most notably the flower children of the 1960s — in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. During the Summer of Love in 1967, as the war in Vietnam escalated, student protests increased at Berkeley and elsewhere in California, as they did across the country. A year later, amid rising racial tensions, Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed, setting off riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles and in other cities. Soon thereafter, Robert F. Kennedy was fatally shot in Los Angeles after winning the California Democratic Party presidential primary. Antiwar protests continued into the 1970s. Perhaps in response to an increasingly violent society, the 1970s also gave rise to several exotic religions and cults, which found eager adherents in California. The spiritual New Age continued into the 1980s, along with a growing population, environmental pollution, and escalating social ills, especially in Los Angeles. Real-estate values soared, the computer industry — centered in Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco —boomed, and banks and businesses prospered.
The late 1980s and early 1990s, however, brought a devastating recession to the state. Los Angeles stayed perpetually in the news, thanks to grave issues such as the race riots spurred by a videotaping and subsequent acquittal of four white police officers beating black motorist Rodney King, along with ultimately trivial if captivating ones like the O.J. Simpson murder case and other celebrity peccadilloes. Two years later, a major earthquake caused billions of dollars in damage to L.A. and left thousands injured and homeless, while Oakland’s hills became a raging inferno, killing 26 people and destroying 3,000 homes. Midway through the 1990s, the U.S. economy slowly began to improve, a welcome relief to recession-battered Californians. Crime and unemployment began to drop, while public schools received millions for muchneeded improvements. Computer- and Internet-related industries flourished in the Bay Area, with entrepreneurialism fueling much of the growth. As the stock market continued its record-setting pace, no state reaped more benefits than California, which was gaining new millionaires by the day. At the millennium, optimism in the state’s economy and quality of life was at an all-time high.
At the turn of the century, the economy was still strong, the unemployment rate still low, and property rates still rising. Then came some outof-the-blue sucker punches to California’s rosy economy, including the rapid demise of many, if not most, of the dot-coms in the stock-market slump and an energy deregulation scheme gone awry, leaving irate residents with periodic rolling blackouts and escalating energy bills. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the following national trauma and economic downturn hit California hard.
And just when things seemed to be getting back to normal, along came the 2003 recall effort to oust Governor Gray Davis, launching California politics into the national news limelight as Arnold “The Terminator” Schwarzenegger unseated the unpopular politician. Not to be outdone, the following year San Francisco elected a 36-year-old supervisor, Gavin Newsom, as mayor. He quickly made national headlines by authorizing city hall to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He even performed a few of the unions. Six months later, the state supreme court invalidated 3,955 gay marriages. California: It’s like that. It may be many things, but boring is never one of them.

From gold rush to great depression

In 1848, California’s non–Native American population was around 7,000. But then gold was discovered in them thar hills — well, flakes at a sawmill along the American River, anyway. Faster than you can say “Eureka, California!” 300,000 men and women rushed into the state between 1849 and 1851, one of the largest mass migrations in U.S. history. Very few of them found any actual gold, foreshadowing similar migrations trying to hit it big in the movie industry. In 1850, California was admitted to the Union as the 31st state. The state constitution on which California applied for admission included several noteworthy features that set up California as the progressive (to some, flaky and overly liberal) place it remains. To protect the miners, slavery was prohibited. To attract women from the East Coast, legal recognition was given to the separate property of a married woman (California was the first state to offer such recognition).
Not-so-progressively, by 1870, almost 90 percent of the state’s Native American population had been wiped out, and the bulk of the rest were removed to inland reservations.

In 1875, when the Santa Fe Railroad reached Los Angeles, Southern California’s population of just 10,000 was divided equally between Los Angeles and San Diego. As San Francisco, around the tenth-largest city in the United States, suffered a serious setback in the form of the infamous 1906 earthquake and subsequent devastating fire (it rallied fast and strong enough to host the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition), Los Angeles got its own growth spurt, and identity, thanks to the nascent movie industry realizing that in places where it doesn’t snow, you can film outdoors year-round. The movies’ glamorous, idyllic portrayal of California boosted the region’s popularity and population, especially during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when thousands of families (like the Joads in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath) packed up their belongings and headed west in search of a better life.

From Portuguese Era to United States Era

Portuguese explorer Juan Rodrígues Cabrillo is credited with being the first European to “discover” (in 1542) California, beginning the process of newcomers wrecking the state for the natives (a complaint that remains today, although the self-proclaimed “natives” are people whose residency ranges from a couple of years to two whole generations). Over the next 200 years, dozens of sailors mapped the coast, including British explorer Sir Francis Drake, who sailed his Golden Hind into what is now called Drake’s Bay in 1579, and Spanish explorer Sebastian Vizcano, who, in 1602, bestowed most of the place names that survive today, including San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Carmel.
European colonial competition and Catholic missionary zeal prompted Spain to establish settlements along the Alta (upper) California coast and claim the lands as its own. In 1769, teeny (5-foot-nothing) Father Junípero Serra, accompanied by 300 soldiers and clergy, began forging a path from Mexico to Monterey. A small mission and presidio (fort) were established that year at San Diego, and by 1804, a chain of 21 missions, each a day’s walk from the next along a dirt road called Camino Real (Royal Road), stretched all the way to Sonoma. Most of the solidly built missions — Mission Delores, Mission San Juan Bautista, Mission San Diego de Alcala, to name just a few — still remain and offer public tours. The missions are pretty and pious, but their existence resulted in the usual story: Thousands of Native Americans were converted to Christianity and coerced into labor. Many others died from imported diseases. Because not all the natives welcomed their conquerors with open arms, many missions and pueblos (small towns) suffered repeated attacks, leading to the construction of California’s now ubiquitous —and fireproof — red-tile roofs.
Embattled at home as well as abroad, the Spanish relinquished their claim to Mexico and California in 1821. Under Mexican rule, Alta California’s Spanish missionaries fell out of favor and lost much of their land to the increasingly wealthy Californios — Mexican immigrants who had been granted tracts of land.
Beginning in the late 1820s, Americans from the East began to make their way to California via a three-month sail around Cape Horn. Most of them settled in the territorial capital of Monterey and in Northern California. From the 1830s on, Manifest Destiny led many a pioneer to go west, young man — and woman. The first covered-wagon train made the fourmonth crossing in 1844. Over the next few years, several hundred Americans made the trek to California over the Sierra Nevada range via Truckee Pass, just north of Lake Tahoe. A memorial to the Donner Party — the most famous tragedy in the history of westward migration, and the subject of many a culinary joke we won’t repeat — marks the site of the ill-fated travelers.
In 1846, President James Polk offered Mexico $40 million for California and New Mexico, a sum that will barely get you a shack on the beach in Malibu today. The offer might have been accepted, but the two countries got too busy fighting over Texas, instead. The United States won and simply took over the entire West Coast. (This chain of events throws an interesting light on the attitudes toward Mexican immigrants today.)