California Writers - Literature by Region

For being such a large and historically important state in the 20^th century, California has produced relatively few big names in letters.

John Steinbeck hailed from the Golden State. And he is California's most renowned author, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. His works are central to the high school literature cannon and stand as accessible explorations of lives of the labor class between 1920 and 1950 with an emphasis on the lands near Salinas, California. You will be hard pressed to find a name as big as Steinbeck's in American literature, though it will be widely agreed that he is not thought of as one of the very greatest of American writers.*

Steinbeck is probably best put on par with Mark Twain, another legendary writer who focused on the human side of human rights and the difficult achievement of nobility within the torpors and convolutions of an uncertain culture. More than this particular focus, these two writers shared a passion for their own region. Steinbeck set many of his books in and around Salinas, California. In the same way, Mark Twain focused on life in Missouri along the Mississippi in wroting his two major works - Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.

Were the quality of his prose more consistent and were the polemics played more subtly, Steinbeck might have been remembered for his art. Of Mice and Men is a major artistic achievement because the prose was truly impeccable and the story was just a story, resonant with meaning. It was not a thinly veiled philosophical argument.

East of Eden was perhaps a more forceful novel but it was also a forced piece of work, the characters sorted into categories and bags and dogmas...in East of Eden John Steinbeck allows the ideological thrust to trump the artistic/lyrical thrust and ultimately this sprawling novel falls short of the pleasure of his "less ambitious" works such as Tortilla Flats and The Pearl.

*

If we say the Beats were based in San Francisco, then California can lay partial claim to Kerouac, Ginsberg and Kesey. If we do not allow California claim to the Beats (because they were not born or raised in California) then the list of California writers becomes considerably shorter.

In fairness to the national interests of the Beats, we should probably exclude them from our list of California writers. They wrote about America with the double capital "A". They moved like a tide from coast to coast, talking, talking and talking and expounding on American culture, American spiritualism, American dharma, and an American awakening on shifty rooftops.

Without the Beats, the short list of California writers would go something like this: Nathanael West, John Fante, and Charles Bukowski.

These are all very, very talented writers and they each hail from LA, but they are probably more regional figures than national ones. The quality writing ranks with the big boys in America, but the names don't resound like "Pound", "Frost", "Wright", "Baldwin", or even "Dos Passos".*

For the contemporary reader, these latter California writers really should be on everyone's short list. Read the novella Hour of the Locustby Nathanael West and read the novels Ask the Dust and The Road to Los Angelesby John Fante if you haven't already. These books capture the complexities and cynicisms of the Hollywood American dream, from rags to riches and fame to infamy, as well as the secular-decadent dream that Hollywood has given America with its fictions (and the scummy underbelly of this Glamorous Fiction).

Another name that once appeared on the list of up-and-coming literary voices in America is Brett Easton Ellis. He was once highly respected and widely read, but seems to have fallen from his brief pedestal.

*As seen above, we are excluding Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey and the rest of the group known as the Beats because they were not born in California, did not write about California with any kind of special interest, and, on the contrary, expressed national interests first and foremost in their books of the 1950's and 1960's.

* A short list of names that precede him in eminence: William Faulkner, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and Saul Bellow. These are figures of global prominence, whereas Steinbeck remains something of a regional writer, despite his huge success.

If we do make general considerations, Steinbeck is held on par with Hemingway and Faulkner, if for nothing else because they each won the same, Swedish award. In this case, the category should be "renowned American writers" or "revered" American writers, but certainly should not be "best American writers". Though there is not now and never will be a consensus as to who is/has been America's greatest writing talent, ever, in the areas of poetry or fiction, Steinbeck is not going to be included.

Suggesting that there are better American writers than Steinbeck is not meant derisively in anyway. The fact is that America has produced several unique, expressive, and significant writers (in degrees greater than John Steinbeck). Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemmingway, and William Faulkner would all rank among the names of the "best American writers". Other names would fit in this category also, before Steinbeck, in this writer's opinion. Henry James, Robert Frost, Nathanial Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Saul Bellow and Wallace Stevens are all writers of what might be termed historic significance.