Publisher's Synopsis
Somewhere between expectation and experience exists a place, or series of places, called California. People pass their lives there with passion or ennui, with hope or despair, each perhaps affected by where they are because California has never been allowed to be merely a state in the Union: it is also a state of the mind.;In fact, contemporary illusions concerning the Golden State are largely the product of general misunderstanding fostered by mass media that proclaim versions of Southern California's beach-bum and movie-star image to be the entire state's homogeneous reality. California is large, geographically and culturally varied, multi-ethnic since earliest settlement, and now features mainland America's most heterogenous populace.;Five geo/literary regions have emerged in writing from the Golden Stage, each of them reflecting regional frontiers with distinct terrains, patterns of settlement, and literary outputs. The North Coast extends from Big Sur north toward Oregon, with San Francisco its hub; in no other place did the East more dramatically penetrate and influence the West. The Great Central Valley is a "state-within-the-state" that is among the nation's leaders in the production of agriculture, petroleum and poets. Wilderness California is a varied catchall that includes the state's mountains, deserts, and forests - vast tracts still little-settled if widely used. Finally there is Southern California, dominated today by the Los Angeles - San Diego freeway culture; Middle American and hardworking at its core, it is a literary netherworld where hope and realization spar, the most visible border with Fantasy California. The latter is this state's fifth literary arena - a region of the mind.;Fantasy California is a realm of sun-bleached blondes in convertibles racing to hot tubs after their screen tests or, in the last century, a place where gold nuggets could be scooped up by the shovelful and fruit burgeoned year-round.;All these Californias and others combine to produce literature that is varied and rich and controversial: many Californias.;This anthology is a collection of California writers and their works. Authors range from Richard Henry Dana and Joaquin Miller to Maxine Hong Kingston, Jack Kerouac, and Joan Didion. "Many Californias", the first collection of its kind, is a multicultural reader that may appeal to general readers interested in the writings about this diverse state as well as scholars of American literature.;"Gerald W. Haslam has published six collections of short stories. In 1990, he published two essay collections, "The other California: the Great Central Valley in life and letters" and "Coming of age in California: personal essays". He has published one other essay collection, a novel, and four books of various non-fiction. Haslam's career as a writer has been marked by his use of California's rural and small-town areas, its poor and working-class people of all colours, to explore the human condition. He is a professor of English at Sonoma State University.".
