Music & the Arts - Coastal California - page 1150

A young cartoonist named Walt Disney arrived in LA in 1923, and five years later had his
first breakout hit, Steamboat Willie , starring a mouse named Mickey, which eventually
spawned the entire Disney empire.
Literature
Californians read more than movie scripts: they make up the largest market for books in
the US, and read much more than the national average. You've probably already read
books by Californians without knowing it: Ray Bradbury's 1950s dystopian classic
Fahrenheit 451, Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Color Purple , Ken Kesey's
quintessential '60s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , Maxine Hong Kingston's The
Woman Warrior , Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or
something by Bay Area publisher McSweeney's.
Arguably the most influential author to ever emerge from coastal California was social
realist John Steinbeck. Published in the 1930s, his first California novel, Tortilla Flat ,
takes place in Monterey's Mexican American community, while his masterpiece, The
Grapes of Wrath, tells of the struggles of migrant farm workers during the Great Depres-
sion.
In the 1930s, San Francisco and LA became capitals of pulp detective novels, which
were often turned into Hollywood noir films. Dashiell Hammett ( The Maltese Falcon )
made San Francisco's fog a sinister character. The king of hard-boiled crime writers was
Raymond Chandler ( The Big Sleep ), who thinly disguised Santa Monica as shadowy Bay
City. In the 1990s, a contemporary renaissance of noir crime fiction was masterminded by
James Ellroy ( LA Confidential ) and Walter Mosley ( Devil in a Blue Dress ), whose Easy
Rawlins novels are set in South Central LA.
Beginning in the 1950s, the Beat Generation of writers fired up San Francisco's North
Beach literary scene, revolving around City Lights Bookstore founded by poet Lawrence
Ferlinghetti. Allen Ginsberg's epic poem Howl was put on trial for obscenity in 1957,
while Jack Kerouac's renegade novel On the Road became a cult classic. In the early
1970s, Charles Bukowski's semiautobiographical novel Post Office captured down-and-
out Downtown LA, while Richard Vasquez's Chicano took a dramatic look at LA's Latino
barrio. Up north, the serial-style Tales of the City, by Armistead Maupin, was a frothy
taste of 1970s San Francisco, following the lives of colorful characters, gay and straight.