The first dreamers
From the Conquistadors of the 16th century, who thought they had discovered the island where one of the famous cities of gold would be located, to the Gold Rush of the 19th century, the fantasy of getting rich seems inseparable from California. Witness Mark Twain (1835-1910), who humorously recounts in À la dure the journey he undertook with his brother, how he himself almost succumbed to fever and then nearly drowned in Mono Lake. This semi-autobiographical account was published in 1872, four years before a young Scotsman fell madly in love with a married artist and mother of two, 10 years his senior, whom he left to join in California despite the formal opposition of his family. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) and Fanny Osbourne eventually married on May 19, 1880 in San Francisco... and spent their honeymoon in a disused silver mine in Calistoga. This is the story he depicts in The Silverado Road, a grand fresco of the Golden State in the days of the gold diggers.
While some dream of wealth and others of love, one man crisscrosses the Sierra Nevada, obsessed with preserving nature. The commitment of John Muir (1838-1914), thanks to whom the idea of creating Yosemite National Park was born, can be discovered in Un Été dans la Sierra or L'Appel du sauvage, Célébrations de la nature, as well as in the biography devoted to him by Alexis Jenni published by Paulsen in 2020: I could have become a millionaire, but I chose to be a vagabond.
On January 12, 1876, the end of the 19th century saw the birth in San Francisco of John Griffith Chaney, better known by his pseudonym Jack London. His literary career seemed to encapsulate all the dreams of his elders in a single word: adventure. A chaotic youth took him on the road before he was 16, and as many journeys followed as books. If Croc-Blanc has left its mark on schoolchildren and Martin Eden, his novelized autobiography, on adults, his work is vast. He travels the road with vagabonds, Klondike gold miners, strikers, pearl or whale fishermen... A nimble pen that only his early death, at the age of 40, would stop.
Towards black novels
With a touch of romanticism, we could imagine Jack London passing the torch to a no less eminent writer born with the century in Salinas. John Steinbeck's America would be very different from that of his predecessors. And yet, if the time of the pioneers was resolutely over, the time of wandering continued, as evidenced by his great work, The Grapes of Wrath, in which he evokes the Great Depression and the sharecroppers who fled Oklahoma and its terrible drought, hoping to find something to survive on in California. Anyone who has read Steinbeck (1902-1968) knows that his writings are never insignificant: he is one of those who make a mark and make a commitment, as much when he uses humor, as in Tortillat Flat, Rue de la Sardine and its sequel Tendre Jeudi, or emotion, as in Des Souris et des hommes and À l'est d'Éden. This rare talent earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.
The early 20thcentury also saw the lights of the Hollywood studios come on. Some found glory there, others, like Tennessee Williams, fell by the wayside. He tried to place his first play, The Glass Menagerie, there, then finally decided to adapt it for the stage, with a success that augured a fine career (and two Pulitzer Prizes). And yet, while Hollywood's sunlight shines brightly, Los Angeles cannot hide its darker corners, which in turn inspire writers who devote themselves to a particular genre: the roman noir. A case in point is The Maltese Falcon, first serialized in Black Mask magazine from 1929 to 1930. Born in Baltimore in 1894, Dashiell Hammett drew on his own experience as a private detective to bring to life Sam Spade, played on screen by Humphrey Bogart in 1941. This novel had an undisputed influence on Raymond Chandler (1888-1959), who published in Black Mask but didn't achieve fame until the age of 50 with The Big Sleep, a dark tale of blackmail solved by another private eye, Philip Marlowe, who made his first appearance - but would return in numerous novels and as many short stories, to be discovered in their entirety in Trouble is My Problem. And we mustn't forget to mention Edward Bunker. Three apples high at the dawn of the '40s - he was born in Hollywood on December 31, 1933 - he was already a regular in reformatories. Unwittingly, he accumulated (along with his troubles) the material he would later reuse in his books, including the classic No Beast SoFierce.
At the time, a man was roaming the streets of Los Angeles in search of yet another job, romance or the fame he'd sought ten years earlier, leaving the Colorado where he'd been born in 1909. In 1938, John Fante finally succeeded in getting his first novel published, Bandini, named after his literary double, whose adventures we'll follow in The Road to Los Angeles and Dreams of Bunker Hill - both published post-mortem - and above all in Ask the Dust(Éditions 10-18), his masterpiece that established him in 1939. By inventing the character of the "magnificent loser", sensitive but somewhat bravado, Fante will certainly influence the generation to come, and without a doubt Charles Bukowski - a colorful novelist, a self-confessed alcoholic with a debonair sense of humor, born in 1920 in Germany and who died in 1994 in San Pedro. Bukowski wrote an indomitable body of work-Memoirs d'un vieux dégueulasse, Pulp, Factotum, etc.-and left a lasting impression. - and left a lasting impression on Bernard Pivot, who had the temerity to invite him to appear on Apostrophes in 1978..
Renaissance and Beat Generation
At the other end of the West Coast, San Francisco has been experiencing a veritable "Renaissance" since the post-war years, driven by poets. Although their names may not be familiar to us - and their work is virtually untranslated - Madeline Gleason, Kenneth Rexroth and Jack Spicer were at the heart of this effervescence, which resulted in the founding of a Guild, publications, a festival, the creation of the "6" art gallery... However, it was really a publishing house and bookshop that were to become legendary. City Lights Booksellers & Publishers was founded in 1953 by Peter D. Martin and quickly taken over by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti - whose travel diaries, published under the title La Vie Vagabonde, are well worth discovering. Three years later, Ferlinghetti decided to publish Howl, a poem by Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), which once again earned them a lawsuit for obscenity. No matter: the Beat Generation was born. The following year, in 1957, Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) finally succeeded in getting On the Road published in New York, a semi-autobiographical text that he had constantly reworked at the request of publishers who feared prosecution. In 1959, William S. Burroughs published The Naked Feast in Paris. Three men, three seminal books, and one almost mythical figure, that of Neal Cassady (1926-1968), a car - and drug - addict who constantly travelled from New York to San Francisco, taking his friends in his wake, his freedom and his gentle madness. It would be futile to try and name the myriad of authors associated in one way or another with the Beat Generation, but it's essential to point out that (much to Kerouac's dismay) the hippie movement and its sexual revolution were born of it. This new era will be documented by journalist Joan Didion, born in Sacramento in 1934 - some of whose columns can be found in L'Amérique - as well as by Eve Babitz (1943-2021), muse of the counter-culture to be read in Points : En tenue d'Ève, Sex & Rage...
If he's nicknamed the "last of the Beats", Richard Brautigan makes the connection with another emblematic place of the '50s and '60s, mentioned in the title of his first book(Un Général sudiste de Big Sur, 1964). Although it didn't win him over, the writer made up for it in 1967 with Trout Fishing in America. Big Sur is a 140 km stretch of coastline between San Francisco and Santa Maria. This rather untamed territory was home to many writers, including New Yorker Henry Miller (1891-1980), whose Sexus, Plexus and Nexus trilogy also shook things up. Hunter S. Thompson, the inventor of gonzo journalism, or Aldous Huxley, who showed a completely different face in The Gates of Perception and his famous dystopia Brave New World.
A land of success
Philip K. Dick (1928-1982), who spent most of his life in California, is unclassifiable, but impossible not to mention. In fact, he set two novels there that stand somewhat apart from his vast output of science-fiction texts - Ubik, The Master of the High Castle, etc. - namely Confessions of a Madman and Radio Free Albuquerque. - Confessions d'un barjo and Radio libre Albemuth, two interesting gateways for those who want to get a feel for the character before exploring his universes.
Over the decades, the West Coast has continued to be generous in giving birth to writers who all deserve to be known. Don Carpenter (1931-1995) can be read with pleasure at Cambourakis Editions, which has done a fine job of reissuing hisworks (Un dernier verre au bar sans nom, Sale temps pour les braves, La Promo 49...), as well as Jim Dodge's best-seller L'Oiseau canadèche. Dan Fante (son of John, born in 1944 and deceased in 2015) can be found at Points (Régime sec, La Tête hors de l'eau, Limousines blanches et blondes platine). In a darker genre, James Ellroy, born in 1948 in Los Angeles, is a must. Not only for The Black Dahlia , which recounts a sordid murder in his hometown in 1947, but also for L.A. Confidential, Ma part d'ombre and his Underworld USA trilogy. The work of Bret Easton Ellis is also immense(Less than Zero, Glamorama, Lunar Park...). Although he chose to leave Los Angeles, his bestseller American Psycho echoes the novel The Demon, by Hubert Selby Jr. (1928-2004), who decided to settle there. In conclusion, there's hardly any need to mention the many volumes of Armistead Maupin's San Francisco Chronicles , which capture the essence of Californian life to perfection.
