The author's personal preferences for 31 works which have been read beyond a single generation, ranging from Anza's California Expedition to Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely, are the subject of this illuminating study of the creative impulse of writers, not necessarily native sons, who have made California the setting of their masterpieces. In combining biography and criticism the author has gone to the original sources of each work, seeking the forces that created it--a love of landscape or a woman, literary chronicle of California, seen against a background of seacoast, valleys, mountains, deserts, and cities. Among the thousands of books of Californiana, it may be safely said that there is none like this one which blends literature, history, and geography with biography and criticism. First serialized in Westways these chapters were widely hailed as a freshly original guide to California's living literature. Now revised and rearranged, with the addition of brief reading lists, photographs, and a map, they form a valuable introduction for readers of all ages to one of California's chief glories, its richly varied creative literature.