Recommended Books

Historical Perspectives

When it comes to fictionalized accounts of California's pioneers, readers have lots of choices. Salinas native John Steinbeck, one of the state's best-known authors, paints a vivid portrayal of proletarian life in the early to mid-1900s. His Grapes of Wrath remains the classic account of itinerant farm laborers coming to California in the midst of the Great Depression. Cannery Row has forever made the Monterey waterfront famous, and East of Eden offers insight into the way of life in the Salinas Valley.

Famed humorist and storyteller Mark Twain penned vivid tales during California's Gold Rush era, including one of his most popular works, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (an annual Gold Country competition that still has legs). Other good Gold Rush reads include Bret Harte's The Luck of Roaring Camp, a sentimental tale of hard-luck miners and their false toughness, and J. S. Holliday's The World Rushed In, one of the finest nonfiction accounts of the Gold Rush still in print.

San Francisco was also a popular setting for many early works, including Twain's San Francisco, a collection of articles that glorified "the liveliest, heartiest community on our continent." It was also the birthplace of Jack London, who wrote several short stories of his younger days as an oyster pirate on the San Francisco Bay, as well as Martin Eden, his semiautobiographical account of life along the Oakland shores.

The Literature of California: Writings from the Golden State, from the University of California Press, is an excellent anthology, representing writers from the various cultures that have driven state history.

Finally, for what some critics consider the best novel ever written about Hollywood, turn to Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, a savage and satirical look at life on the fringes of the film industry in the 1930s.

Mystery and Mayhem

For you mystery buffs headed to California, two must-reads include Frank Norris's McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, a tale of love and greed set at the turn of the 20th century, and Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, a detective novel that captures the seedier side of San Francisco in the 1920s. Another favorite is Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, in which Philip Marlowe explores the darker side of Los Angeles in the 1930s.

California has always been a hotbed for alternative -- and, more often than not, controversial -- literary styles. Joan Didion, in her novel Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and Hunter S. Thompson, in his columns for the San Francisco Examiner (brought together in the collection Generation of Swine), both used a "new journalistic" approach in their studies of San Francisco in the 1960s. Tom Wolfe's early work The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test follows the Hell's Angels, the Grateful Dead, and Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters as they ride through the hallucinogenic 1960s. Meanwhile, in "Howl" and On the Road, Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, respectively, were penning protests against political conservatism -- and promoting their bohemian lifestyle.

Contemporary Fiction

If you're interested in a contemporary look back at four generations in the life of an American family, you can do no better than Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1971, this work chronicles the lives of pioneers on the Western frontier. Stegner's many other works of fiction and nonfiction about the West include his novel All the Little Live Things, set in the San Francisco Bay Area of the 1960s.

Special-Interest Reads

Geology buffs will want to pack a copy of Assembling California, John McPhee's observation of California's geological history. Mike Davis's City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear offer a critical perspective on the social and natural history of Los Angeles.

Outdoor enthusiasts have dozens of sporting books to choose from, but most comprehensive are Foghorn Press's California Camping, California Fishing, California Golf, California Beaches, and California Hiking.