The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s
by Kevin Starr
Americans and the California Dream (Book 5)
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What we now call "the good life" first appeared in California during the 1930s. Motels, home trailers, drive-ins, barbecues, beach life and surfing, sports from polo and tennis and golf to mountain climbing and skiing, "sportswear" (a word coined at the time), and sun suits were all a part ofthe good life--perhaps California's most distinctive influence of the 1930s. In The Dream Endures, Kevin Starr shows how the good life prospered in California--in pursuits such as film, fiction, leisure, show more and architecture--and helped to define American culture and society then and for years to come.Starr previously chronicled how Californians absorbed the thousand natural shocks of the Great Depression--unemployment, strikes, Communist agitation, reactionary conspiracies--in Endangered Dreams, the fourth volume of his classic history of California. In The Dream Endures, Starr reveals theother side of the picture, examining the newly important places where the good life flourished, like Los Angeles (where Hollywood lived), Palm Springs (where Hollywood vacationed), San Diego (where the Navy went), the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (where Einstein went and changedhis view of the universe), and college towns like Berkeley. We read about the rich urban life of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and in newly important communities like Carmel and San Simeon, the home of William Randolph Hearst, where, each Thursday afternoon, automobiles packed with Hollywoodcelebrities would arrive from Southern California for the long weekend at Hearst Castle.The 1930s were the heyday of the Hollywood studios, and Starr brilliantly captures Hollywood films and the society that surrounded the studios. Starr offers an astute discussion of the European refugees who arrived in Hollywood during the period: prominent European film actors and artists and thecreative refugees who were drawn to Hollywood and Southern California in these years--Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Man Ray, Bertolt Brecht, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Mann, and Franz Werfel. Starr gives a fascinating account of how many of them attempted to recreate theirEuropean world in California and how others, like Samuel Goldwyn, provided stories and dreams for their adopted nation. Starr reserves his greatest attention and most memorable writing for San Francisco. For Starr, despite the city's beauty and commercial importance, San Francisco's most importantachievement was the sense of well-being it conferred on its citizens. It was a city that "magically belonged to everyone."Whether discussing photographers like Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, "hard-boiled fiction" writers, or the new breed of female star--Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow, Bette Davis, Carole Lombard, and the improbable Mae West--The Dream Endures is a brilliant social and cultural history--in many waysthe most far-reaching and important of Starr's California books. show lessTags
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Author explains how Californians rebounded from the Great Depression in the 1930s.
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32+ Works 2,682 Members
Kevin Starr was born in San Francisco, California on September 3, 1940. He received a bachelor's degree in English from the University of San Francisco in 1962. After serving two years in the Army in West Germany, he received a master's degree in 1965 and a PhD in English and American literature in 1969 from Harvard University. He returned to San show more Francisco in 1973 and served as an aide and speechwriter to Mayor Joseph Alioto. After being appointed city librarian, he received a master's degree in library science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1974. He wrote a column for The San Francisco Examiner and was appointed a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Southern California in 1989. In 1994, Governor Pete Wilson named him state librarian, a post he held for 10 years. He wrote numerous book about the history of California including the eight-volume California Dream series, California, Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America's Greatest Bridge, and Continental Ambitions: Roman Catholics in North America, the Colonial Experience. In 2006, he received the National Humanities Medal for his work as a scholar and historian from President George W. Bush. He died from a heart attack on January 14, 2017 at the age of 76. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s
- Original publication date
- 1997
- Important places
- California, USA
- Dedication
- for Sheldon Meyer
- First words
- Chapter 1, Good Times on the Coast - In a three-part series published in Westways in the fall of 1936, Los Angeles journalist Farnsworth Crowder assessed the California temperament as a matter of sunshine, physicality, and th... (show all)e pleasure principle.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Chapter 13, From Catastrophe to Covenant - When the war was over and Europe was rebuilt, they found themselves, most of them, together with their children and their children's children, still sojourning beneath the palm trees of this sunny southern latitude. Why return? They were already home.
- Original language
- English
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 979.4052
- Canonical LCC
- F866
Classifications
- Genres
- History, Nonfiction, General Nonfiction
- DDC/MDS
- 979.4052 — History & geography History of North America Great Basin and Pacific Slope region of United States California General California History
- LCC
- F866 — Local History of the United States, Canada and Latin America United States local history California
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 150
- Popularity
- 217,666
- Reviews
- 3
- Rating
- (4.45)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 3
- ASINs
- 1
