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In Books, the California Promise and a Century of Reinvention

These titles track how the Golden State dream has been imagined, tested and rewritten across generations.

Since the nation's founding, Americans have gone west in search of dreams. For some, that dream was gold. For others, work—any sort would do. Later, it was stardom. The blinding rays of the sun weren't bright enough; they needed movie lights. But if America represented the dream, California was its fever. Millions went looking for opportunity. Plenty got work, but most lost out on the big time. In Of Mice and Men, Crooks, the bitter stable-hand, deflates Lennie's fantasy of owning some land with George and raising chickens, "Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land."

The Great Depression should have ended the dream. But while 15 million Americans were unemployed, Fred Astaire danced with Ginger Rogers, wearing a top hat and tails and singing about the loveliness of getting caught in the rain. A town called Hollywood had turned the dream into a factory and then industry. By the 1970s, however, people were waking up. James Dean and Marilyn Monroe were dead, television kept people indoors, and Charles Manson got his followers to kill a pregnant Sharon Tate in 1969. How could a dream survive that?

There are two themes that come up time and time again in Californian novels: heat and disappointment. They're there in Joan Didion's prose and Raymond Chandler's pulp, as well as contemporary works by Miranda July and Tommy Orange. (The dream now is Silicon Valley. Dreams so often morph into nightmares.) It's no surprise then that there have been so many novels set in California. But the state, with "air you can kiss" as Kerouac wrote, is rarely just a backdrop; rather, the Golden State is almost always a character, or a metaphor, or at the very least a noticeable presence, overbearing or passively observing protagonists looking for something better and rarely finding it. Here are some key novels about the dreams and realities of California.

Books that explore the California dream

'Cannery Row' by John Steinbeck

'Ask The Dust' by John Fante

'Play It As It Lays' by Joan Didion

'Less Than Zero' by Bret Easton Ellis

'The Joy Luck Club' by Amy Tan

'Big Sur' by Jack Kerouac

'There, There' by Tommy Orange

'All Fours' by Miranda July

'Cannery Row' by John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck is the novelist of early California. His canonical works, namely Of Mice and Men and the epics East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath, all contain characters searching for something better in the midst of........

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