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A rich mosaic of diary entries and letters from Marilyn Monroe, Cesar Chavez, Susan Sontag, Albert Einstein, and many more, this is the story of Los Angeles as told by locals, transplants, and some just passing through. “Los Angeles is refracted in all its irreducible, unexplainable glory.”—Los Angeles Times The City of Angels has played a distinct role in the hearts, minds, and imaginations of millions of people, who see it as the ultimate symbol of the American Dream. David Kipen, a cultural historian and avid scholar of Los Angeles, has scoured libraries, archives, and private estates to assemble a kaleidoscopic view of a truly unique city. From the Spanish missionary expeditions in the early 1500s to the Golden Age of Hollywood to the strange new world of social media, this collection is a slice of life in L.A. through the years. The pieces are arranged by date—January 1st to December 31st—featuring selections from different decades and centuries. What emerges is a vivid tapestry of insights, personal discoveries, and wry observations that together distill the essence of the city. As sprawling and magical as the city itself, Dear Los Angeles is a fascinating, must-have collection for everyone in, from, or touched by Southern California. With excerpts from the writing of Ray Bradbury • Edgar Rice Burroughs • Octavia E. Butler • Italo Calvino • Winston Churchill • Noël Coward • Simone De Beauvoir • James Dean • T. S. Eliot • William Faulkner • Lawrence Ferlinghetti • Richard Feynman • F. Scott Fitzgerald • Allen Ginsberg • Dashiell Hammett • Charlton Heston • Zora Neale Hurston • Christopher Isherwood • John Lennon • H. L. Mencken • Anaïs Nin • Sylvia Plath • Ronald Reagan • Joan Rivers • James Thurber • Dalton Trumbo • Evelyn Waugh • Tennessee Williams • P. G. Wodehouse • and many more Advance praise for Dear Los Angeles “This book’s a brilliant constellation, spread out over a few centuries and five thousand square miles. Each tiny entry pins the reality of the great unreal city of Angels to a moment in human time—moments enthralled, appalled, jubilant, suffering, gossiping or bragging—and it turns out, there’s no better way to paint a picture of the place.”—Jonathan Lethem “[A] scintillating collection of letters and diary entries . . . an engrossing trove of colorful, witty insights.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Dispatches from a land of extremes, by writers and movie stars, natives and visitors, activists and pioneers, and more. California has always been, literally, a place to write home about. Renowned figures and iconoclasts; politicians, actors, and artists; the world-famous and the not-so-much—all have contributed their voices to the patchwork of the state. With this book, cultural historian and California scholar David Kipen reveals this long-storied place through its diaries and letters, and gives readers a highly anticipated follow up to his book Dear Los Angeles. Running from January 1 through December 31, leaping across decades and centuries, Dear California reflects on the state's shifting landscapes and the notion of place. Entries talk across the centuries, from indigenous stories told before the Spanish arrived on the Pacific coast through to present-day tweets, blogs, and other ephemera. The collected voices show how far we've wandered—and how far we still have to go in chasing the elusive California dream. This is a book for readers who love California—and for anyone who simply treasures flavorful writing. Weaving together the personal, the insightful, the impressionistic, the lewd, and the hysterically funny, Dear California presents collected writings essential to understanding the diversity, antagonisms, and abiding promise of the Golden State. Writings from Edward Abbey, Louis Armstrong, Ambrose Bierce, Octavia Butler, John Cage, Willa Cather, Cesar Chavez, Julia Child, Winston Churchill, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Einstein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Fonda, Allen Ginsberg, Dolores Huerta, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Steve Jobs, Billy Joel, Frida Kahlo, John F. Kennedy, Anne Lamott, John Lennon, Groucho Marx, Henri Matisse, Marshall McLuhan, Herman Melville, Charles Mingus, Marilyn Monroe, John Muir, Ronald Reagan, Sally Ride, Joan Rivers, Susan Sontag, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Mark Zuckerberg, and many others.
A diary account of 14-year-old Susanna Fairchild's life in 1849, when her father succumbs to gold fever on the way to establish his medical practice in Oregon after losing his wife and money on their steamship journey from New York. Includes an historical note. Originally published with Scholastic's Dear America series, "Seeds of Hope" shares characters from "Across the Wide and Lonesome Prairie: The Oregon Trail Diary of Hattie Campbell, 1847."
The postborder metropolis of Bajalta California stretches from Los Angeles in the north to Tijuana and Mexicali in the south. Immigrants from all over the globe flock to Southern California, while corporations are drawn to the low wage industry of the Mexican border towns, echoing developments in other rapid growth areas such as Phoenix, El Paso, and San Antonio. This incredibly diverse, transnational megacity is giving birth to new cultural and artistic forms as it rapidly evolves into something unique in the world. Postborder City is a genuinely interdisciplinary investigation of the hybrid culture on both sides of the increasingly fluid U. S.-Mexico border, spanning the disciplines of art and art history, urban planning, geography, Latina/o studies, and American studies.
An award-winning author brings the story of one American girl to life. When Minnie Bonner's father disappears, the wealthy gentleman Edward Sump, led by his avaricious wife, offers Minnie a chance to work as a lady's maid. The Sumps have grand plans, grander than the city of Philadelphia can offer, and decide to move to San Francisco - the greatest city in the west. But when a powerful earthquake strikes, Minnie finds herself the sole survivor among them. After the dust settles, Minnie discovers a bag belonging to the Sumps filled with cash and papers. With no one else to claim it, Minnie has turned into an heiress overnight. Wealth comes at a price, however, and she is soon wrapped up in a deception that leads her down a dangerous path.
In Material Dreams, Starr turns to one of the most vibrant decades in the Golden State's history, the 1920s, when some two million Americans migrated to California, the vast majority settling in or around Los Angeles. Although he treats readers to intriguing side trips to Santa Barbara and Pasadena, Starr focuses here mainly on Los Angeles, revealing how this major city arose almost defiantly on a site lacking many of the advantages required for urban development, creating itself out of sheer will, the Great Gatsby of American cities. He describes how William Ellsworth Smyth, the Peter the Hermit of the Irrigation Crusade, propounded the importance of water in Southern California's future, and how such figures as the self-educated, Irish engineer William Mulholland (who built the main aquaducts to Los Angeles) and George Chaffey (who diverted the Colorado River, transforming desert into the lush Imperial Valley) brought life-supporting water to the arid South. He examines the discovery of oil ("Yes it's oil, oil, oil / that makes LA boil," went the official drinking song of the Uplifters Club), the boosters and land developers, the evangelists (such as Bob Shuler, the Methodist Savanarola of Los Angeles, and Aimee Semple McPherson), and countless other colorful figures of the period. There are also fascinating sections on the city's architecture (such as the remarkably innovative Bradbury Building and its eccentric, neophyte designer, George Wyman), the impact of the automobile on city planning, the great antiquarian book collections, the Hollywood film community, and much more. By the end of the decade, Los Angeles had tripled in population and become the fifth largest city in the nation. In Material Dreams, Kevin Starr captures this explosive growth in a narrative tour de force that combines wide-ranging scholarship with captivating prose.
The Los Angeles region is increasingly being held up as a prototype for the collective urban future of the United States. Yet it is probably the least understood, most under-studied major city in the US. Very few people beyond the boundaries of Southern California have an accurate appreciation of what the region is, who lives there, and what it does. This groundbreaking collection of essays brings together well-respected contributors to dispel the myths about Southern California and to begin the process of `rethinking' Los Angeles.
Spend a delightful evening enthralled by the true and captivating experiences of this city lady who at age 80 spent one full year on her mountain mining claim and faced the challenges of a vastly different life.
From National Book Award-winning author Judy Blundell, a thrilling account of the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. When Minnie Bonner's father disappears after losing the Bonners' Philadelphia tavern, the wealthy gentleman Edward Sump, led by his avaricious wife, offers Minnie a chance to work as a lady's maid to support her family. The Sumps have grand plans, grander than the city of Philadelphia can offer, however, and decide to move to San Francisco -- the greatest city in the west. But when a powerful earthquake strikes, Minnie finds herself the sole survivor among them. After the dust settles, Minnie discovers a bag belonging to the Sumps filled with cash and papers that could drastically change her fortune. With no one else to claim it, Minnie has turned into an heiress overnight. Wealth comes at a price, though, and she is soon wrapped up in a deception that leads her down a dangerous path. As the aftermath of the earthquake ravages the city, Minnie continues to maintain her new identity. That is, until a mysterious but familiar stranger appears.
Letters written in 1878 by a young woman new to the West, and found in an old trunk in the twenty-first century, reveal the daily life of a bygone era in the towns along the Eastern Sierra of California. Revealed are the early pioneers who settled this part of the state, the early ranchers, women both good and "bad," and miners who brought forth gold and silver from the mines of Cerro Gordo, Mammoth, Lundy, Aurora and Bodie. The letters describe the people, places and natural beauty of the area before it became today's recreational paradise, before its water was sent down the California aqueduct to Los Angeles, and before the long asphalt ribbon of Highway 395 cut through it.