This class will be a survey of California writing from the days of Mark Twain and Gertrude Atherton, up until the present day. California, a state of the mind, the "Golden State," often figures in American and world literature as the end of the world, the terminus point, "Land's End." The extraordinary pressure behind such designations has led over the years to an explosion of amazing writing, and our class will look at a lot of it, mostly in short story form. Writers we will examine include Joan Didion, James Ellroy, Tillie Olsen, Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner, Walter Mosley, Jessamyn West, Shirley Jackson, Dennis Cooper, Amy Tan, Philip K. Dick, William Saroyan, Jack Spicer, Luis Valdez, Beverly Cleary, Charles Bukowski, Gertrude Stein, and John Steinbeck.
This class will be a survey of California writing from the days of Mark Twain and Gertrude Atherton, up until the present day. California, a state of the mind, the "Golden State," often figures in American and world literature as the end of the world, the terminus point, "Land's End." The extraordinary pressure behind such designations has led over the years to an explosion of amazing writing, and our class will look at a lot of it, mostly in short story form. Writers we will examine include Joan Didion, James Ellroy, Tillie Olsen, Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner, Walter Mosley, Jessamyn West, Shirley Jackson, Dennis Cooper, Amy Tan, Philip K. Dick, William Saroyan, Jack Spicer, Luis Valdez, Beverly Cleary, Charles Bukowski, Gertrude Stein, and John Steinbeck.