The City and the Fields

The City and the Fields: Multicultural Themes in Modern California Literature, by Marek Breiger, provides an indispensable guide through California’s rich, multicultural literary landscape. What America is to the world, wrote Robert Penn Warren (referring to John Steinbeck), California is to America. California literature - which is multi-regional and multicultural - reflects major themes of American literature in terms of the dreams of refuge for the oppressed, justice for the poor, and dreams of new beginnings. Focusing on literature that is specifically Californian helps us understand how we are a part of a procession that is larger than ourselves. To this end, The City and the Fields explores writers of California literature from the beginning of the 20th century with Jack London, to the end of the 20th century with Amy Tan, and the beginning of the 21st century with Gerald Haslam. The 40 writers explored in this book are: Jack London / Amy Tan / Malcolm Margolin / Theodora Kroeber / Sylvia Sun Minnick / John Muir / William Saroyan / John Steinbeck / Horace McCoy / Charles Bukowsky / Nathaniel West / Tillie Olsen / Dorothea Lange (a literary photographer / Toshio Mori / Maya Angelou / Ella Leffland / Jean Wakatsuki Houston and James Houston / Jose Antonio Villareal / Floyd Salas / Luis Valdez / Frank Chin / Maxine Hong Kingston / Gus Lee / Leonard Gardner / Jack Kerouac / Joan Didion / Hugh Pearson / Jess Mowry / Scott Momaday / Thomas Sanchez / Greg Sarris / Malcolm Margolin / Richard Rodriguez / Gary Soto / Dorothy Bryant / Herbert Gold / Hisaye Yamamoto / Wallace Stegner / Gerald Haslam / and Richard Dokey.