Written by Gabriel Bell
The land we now call California began as a home to hundreds of thousands of Indigenous peoples across more than a hundred culturally distinct tribes. For thousands of years these societies lived in isolation from European expansionism, barring a brief encounter with Spanish colonists in 1542 who, under the leadership of captain Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, found the land too harsh for their liking and returned home empty-handed. The failed Cabrillo expedition warded off further European probing into California for over two hundred years, but that didn’t stop Spain from claiming it – as well as most of the modern-day Sun Belt – as the Alta California province of its main colonial project in the Americas: New Spain,. It wasn’t until 1602 that Spanish sailor Sebastián Vizcaíno and his crew mapped the west coast up to southern Oregon, inspiring other elements of New Spanish society – namely, missions and rancheros – to begin putting down roots.
In these early days, Alta California was not an attractive colonial prospect – the hostile weather, remote terrain, and lack of substantial flora or fauna made it a money sink, as only church-backed missions and crown-backed colonists dared to take their chances. Efforts to reinforce Spain’s presence in Las Californias, like the 1769 Portolá expedition and the 1774-1776 Anza Expeditions that settled the San Francisco Bay, succeeded in greatly expanding Spanish population of the province, but those settlements thrived mainly on Spanish aid, not local and replenishable resources. Alta California’s fate was tied intimately to New Spain’s – and when New Spain took its fate into its own hands and declared independence, Alta California was whipped headfirst into the establishment of an independent Mexico in 1821.
While the struggling and inhospitable Alta California was largely ignored by a young and chaotic Mexican government, the territory-hungry Polk administration saw a golden opportunity for expansion. By the time the Mexican-American War broke out in April 1846 and control of much of Northern California was seized by a band of only thirty-three American settlers, James K. Polk had already ordered his men to support their efforts at forming an independent Bear Flag Republic – a republic which would only last twenty-five days, accepting annexation by the United States by July 1846. Being referred to as the California Republic after annexation, the 1847 Treaty of Cahuenga and the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo began to shape it into its contemporary borders, and being inspired by the 1848-9 Gold Rush, Congress fast tracked the republic’s admission into the union. Finally, on September 9th, 1850, Congress passed the California Statehood Act, securing it as the nation’s thirty-first state.
To celebrate this 175th anniversary of California’s admission as a state, the following is a list of ten quintessentially Californian works spanning decades, genres, and mediums. No two items on this list are quite alike, but together they paint a striking picture of the unique spirit, style, and story of the land we today call California.
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
“We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal.”
Set in Northern California’s Salinas Valley, Nobel Prize recipient John Steinbeck’s East of Eden is a generational drama of titanic proportions, a War and Peace of America’s own, spanning hundreds of pages and more than half a century of trials and tribulations between two warring families – the Hamiltons and Trasks. Often hailed as Steinbeck’s finest work, Penguin Random House describes it as wielding “the primordial power and simplicity of myth” as the novel’s rival families “helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.”
Mulholland Drive screenplay by David Lynch
“No hay banda! There is no band! Il n’est pas de orquestra! This is all… a tape-recording. No hay banda! And yet we hear a band. If we want to hear a clarinette… listen. […] It is… an illusion!”
No director could harness the absurd and surreal as could David Lynch (Twin Peaks, Eraserhead), and no film of his could so effortlessly twist and shred reality than could Mulholland Drive (2001). The film defies description, following an aspiring actress and a woman with memory loss through a mind-bending cocktail of hallucinations, dream sequences, uncanny performances, and abstract setpieces. The second greatest film of all time according to a NYT poll, and the best according to the BBC and Indiewire, it continues to confound and confuse even after decades of essays, university courses, and fan websites dedicated to unraveling its mysteries.
China Dolls by Lisa See
“A woman isn’t just one thing. The past is in us, constantly changing us. Heartache and failure shift our perspectives as do joy and triumphs. At any moment, on any given day, we can be friends, competitors, or enemies. We can be generous or stingy, loving or petty, helpful or untrustworthy.”
Centered on the lives of three Asian-American women in the San Francisco nightclub scene whose lives are turned upside down by the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the wave of anti-Asian paranoia that gripped the U.S. thereafter, Lisa See’s China Dolls presents a perspective you won’t find so totally and thoroughly expressed many other places. Lee’s attention to detail and relentless research efforts shines through in every moment, creating a scene of 40s San Francisco as lifelike as any contemporary coverage could ever be.
good kid, m.A.A.d. city by Kendrick Lamar
“Brace yourself, I’ll take you on a trip down memory lane / This is not a rap on how I’m slingin’ crack or move cocaine / This is cul-de-sac and plenty Cognac and major pain / Not the drill sergeant, but the stress that weighin’ on your brain.”
The first (but certainly not last) genuine classic in Kendrick Lamar’s discography, good kid, m.A.A.d. city is a strikingly cinematic project that, as Pitchfork writer Jayson Greene puts it, exercises an “autobiographical intensity”: listening to this album, he writes, “feels like walking directly into Lamar’s childhood home and, for the next hour, growing up alongside him.” It is a deeply personal album, as inseparable from Kendrick himself as it is from Compton as a whole, and is a wide-eyed odyssey that sees Kendrick grasping for personal security in the face of tragedy that threatens to repeat itself unless he can rise above it.
Pulp Fiction screenplay by Quentin Tarantino
“…[I]t could mean you’re the righteous man and I’m the shepherd and it’s the world that’s evil and selfish. And I’d like that. But that shit ain’t the truth. The truth is you’re the weak. And I’m the tyranny of evil men. But I’m tryin’, Ringo. I’m tryin’ real hard to be the shepherd.”
Reckless and rambunctious, crass and controversial, vivid and violent, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) is a masterclass in chaotic perfection and an eternal time capsule of 90’s L.A. culture. Featuring a uniquely star-studded cast with the likes of Samuel L. Jackson (Django Unchained, The Hateful Eight), John Travolta (Grease, Saturday Night Fever) and Uma Thurman (Kill Bill, Batman & Robin), every second of Pulp Fiction has been dipped head-to-toe in a uniquely gritty, eclectic, and unquestioningly Californian aesthetic that has forever tied it to the spirit of the state it was written, filmed, and set in.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
“California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”
Beginning as a loose collection of columns, essays, and articles written between magazines like Vogue, Life, and the New Yorker, Sacramento-born author Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem reads like a real-time autopsy on 60’s counterculture in Northern California. An often philosophical work with a hearty propensity for reflection, Didion divides her essays between three categories: Life Styles in the Golden Land, Personals, and Seven Places of the Mind, each inseparable from the California sun under which they were written and the unique cultural climate and moment of 60s Sacramento.
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air created by Andy Borowitz and Susan Borowitz
“Man, you don’t get it, do you? A map is not gonna help you. Neither is your Glee Club, or your fancy Bel-Air address, or who your daddy is. They don’t care about any of that. They only see one thing.”
One of the most iconic sitcoms of the 90s, The Fresh Price of Bel-Air follows a fictionalized Will Smith as he is uprooted and moved from west Philadelphia to Bel-Air, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in all of Los Angeles – and six seasons of hijinks follow. While the show’s concept is simple, its impact is anything but – as Duke professor and author Mark Anthony Neal writes, The Fresh Prince was “a broad metaphor for demographic shifts that were occurring in various American institutions.” The Fresh Prince manifested an explosion in mainstream interest in hip-hop and black art without which our modern pop culture landscape would likely never have existed, and it did so while rooting itself in typically Californian spaces and situations.
The Octopus by Frank Norris
“You are dealing with forces, young man, when you speak of Wheat and the Railroads, not with men… The Wheat is one force, the Railroad, another, and there is the law that governs them – supply and demand.”
Inspired by an 1880 shootout between settler farmers and expanding railroad companies in Northern California, Frank Norris’ 1901 novel The Octopus tells a fictional, yet all-too-real, tale of expansionist ambition and the blood those ambitions inevitably spill. Norris, Penguin Random House describes, “idealizes no one in this epic depiction of the volatile situation,” pitting cropper and capitalist against one another in a vicious struggle for the exploitation of California. Penguin Random House’s edition of The Octopus also begins with an introduction from renowned California historian Kevin Starr who will be making an appearance on this list further on.
Californication by the Red Hot Chili Peppers
“Space may be the final frontier, but it’s made in a Hollywood basement / And Cobain, can you hear the spheres singing songs off Station to Station? / And Alderaan’s not far away, it’s Californication.”
Released in the summer of 1999, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication is as aesthetically Californian as any album could ever aspire to be. A creative collaboration between RHCP and the modern-day musical savant Rick Rubin, Rolling Stone writer Greg Tate described Californication as a “salty marriage of esoteric mythology and insatiable musicality that salvages souls, binds communities and heals the sick.” Between softer, more emotional cuts like “Otherside” and more rock-heavy episodes like “Around the World”, Californication manages to keep its diverse sounds and styles bound together by its unwavering commitment to California culture.
Lady Bird screenplay by Greta Gerwig
“You write about Sacramento so affectionately and with such care.” […] “Sure, I guess I pay attention.” “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?”
The directorial debut of Sacramento-born actress-turned-filmmaker Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird is a coming-of-age story so rich with the scenery and temperament of West Coast youth it could only have been told in Greta’s own California. Although the titular Lady Bird spends much of the film yearning for the East Coast, the key people, places, and experiences of her on-screen life are centered around her life as a student, actor, partner, and person in a Northern California high school. It is an utterly earnest movie, wearing its heart on its sleeve and inviting the viewer to do the same as it sets out to show “the bittersweet feeling of having watched someone grow in front of your eyes,” writes New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott.
California: A History by Kevin Starr
“Such a hope, such a psychology of expectation, fused the California experience irretrievably onto a dream of better days: of a sudden, almost magical, transformation of the ordinary. […] The Spanish quest for El Dorado was now being Americanized with its psychological and mythic hold as powerful as ever.”
A single-volume history of California that refuses to spare even a single detail, renowned California historian Kevin Starr begins from the Spanish conquests and carries on to the Schwarzenegger governorship with the goal of creating a simultaneously complete and complex narrative of the state’s history. Starr, winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship and inductee into the California Hall of Fame, covers each episode of California history with the thoroughness and thoughtfulness they deserve, creating a brilliant historical narrative that future historians may find daunting to write in the legacy of.
“Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck
“Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out there. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody never gets no land. It’s just in their head.”
Often cited as a major reason for John Steinbeck’s 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, Of Mice and Men is one of only a few indisputably classic texts written in, for, and about the United States. Following two migrant field workers trying to find a life and land of their own in Great Depression-era California, Steinbeck described his novella as “so scened and set that it can be played as it stands,” and held so strongly to this notion that he would adapt the text into a play later in his life. Of Mice and Men is both brief in its length and rich in its content, dripping with contemporary American language and vibrant depictions of the less-than-vibrant world around them, and has become a staple of high school curricula across the United States.
