Introduction

Abstract

This book was conceived originally as a survey of California literature. The idea was to study what has come to stand as classic in an essentially romantic body of work, and to define what has never been defined adequately: a California tradition. The undertaking proved as vast as the state itself, and some principle of limitation had to be found. Would the book be a survey per se or a critical appraisal along ‘great tradition’ lines? The primary need seemed to be for the latter. Surveys, particularly of the early period, have been churned out with regularity by anthologisers and collectors of ‘Californiana’. They are still appearing. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s recently published Literary San Francisco is typical of the common approach and has the typical shortcomings.¹ It is a coffee-table book full of glossy photographs and gossipy vignettes; it devotes as much space to Joaquin Miller and William Saroyan as to Jack London and John Steinbeck; it studiously avoids any taint of the ‘academic’ or ‘critical’. This kind of book, whatever its charms, ends by being dilettantish. The tendency to all-inclusiveness and resistance to singling out individuals as ‘great’ inhibit serious discussion. Essential discrimination is lacking. How can a literature, or a culture for that matter, begin to be understood unless there is some consensus as to what is most unique and representative in it?