Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
late-19th-century Klondike Gold Rush. Oakland was famously scorned by 'Lost Genera-
tion' literary luminary Gertrude Stein (who lived there briefly) when she quipped, 'There
is no there there,' although, to be fair, she was really only saying that she couldn't find her
old house when she returned from Europe in the 1930s.
California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present,
edited by Dana Giola, Chryss Yost
and Jack Hicks, is a ground-breaking anthology. Enlightening introductions give each poet
a deserved context.
Pulp Noir & Science Fiction
ln the 1930s, San Francisco and Los Angeles became the capitals of the pulp detective
novel, examples of which were often made into noir crime films. Dashiell Hammett (
The
Maltese Falcon
) made San Francisco's fog a sinister character. The king of hard-boiled
crime writers was Raymond Chandler, who thinly disguised his hometown of Santa Mon-
ica as Bay City. Starting in the 1990s, a neo-noir renaissance of California crime fiction
was masterminded by James Ellroy
(LA Confidential),
the late Elmore Leonard
(Get
Shorty)
and Walter Mosley
(Devil in a Blue Dress),
whose Easy Rawlins detective novels
are set in South Central LA.
California has also proved fertile ground for the imaginations of sci-fi writers. Raised in
Berkeley, Philip K Dick is chiefly remembered for his science fiction, notably
Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,
later adapted into the 1982 dystopian sci-fi movie
Blade Runner
. Dick's novel
The Man in the High Castle
presents the ultimate what-if
scenario: imagine San Francisco circa 1962 if Japan, fascist Italy and Nazi Germany had
won WWII. Berkeley-born Ursula K Le Guin (
The Left Hand of Darkness, A Wizard of
Earthsea
) is a lauded fantasy writer, feminist and essayist.
