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StoryLines California

In October 1999, StoryLines America launched its second phase, this time featuring two series of radio programs in California and the Southeast. This phase was supported by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), with additional support from Barnes & Noble, Inc.

Program 1 Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America This is a moving biography of the only survivor of a northern California tribe who turned up near-death outside a white settlement near the town of Oroville, California in 1911. Ishi was taken in and cared for by anthropologists Thomas Waterman and Alfred Kroeber, whose wife wrote the book after his death in 1960. This is an important glimpse into the old lifeways of Native America, and raises important issues about our treatment of native peoples in general, while documenting the life of Ishi, who went from living a Stone Age style existence to a modern, urban life in San Francisco for five years before his death in 1916 discussion guide (PDF)

Program 2 Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona An epic tale of star-crossed love set in southern California in the nineteenth century during a time of tumultuous change and transition, as immigrants from the U.S. usurped Native American and Mexican lands, lifestyles, and traditions. Written by an outspoken social reformer and champion of equal treatment for American Indians, Ramona is considered a classic period piece and the first southwestern novel. discussion guide (PDF)

Program 3 George R. Stewart, Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party The definitive history of the ill-fated Donner Party, emigrants to California from Illinois in 1846–7, whose ordeal trying to cross the High Sierras in mid-winter the author calls “the most spectacular in the history of western migration.” This is an astonishing account of hope and hardship and what so-called civilized human beings will do to survive, from memorable acts of courage to selfishness, violence, and cannibalism. discussion guide (PDF)

Program 4 Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose This magnificent novel is the story of four generations of an American family. The narrator is an historian trying to reconstruct the lives of his grandfather, a die-hard, taciturn adventurer and mining engineer, and his grandmother, a well-bred Quaker lady who never took to her husband’s harsh life in mining camps and on the range. Beautifully observed, and rich in the dramatic history of the settling of the American West, this novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971. discussion guide (PDF)

Program 5 Frank Norris, The Octopus Reminiscent in tone of Emile Zola’s Germinal, The Octopus is a turn of the century epic of wheat farmers in the San Joaquin Valley struggling against the rapacity of the all-powerful Pacific and Southwestern (i.e. Southern Pacific) Railroad. The company controls the local paper, the land, the legislature, and even the farmers’ own representative on the state rate-fixing commission. An unremitting tale of greed and betrayal by an author who wrote an impressive series of realistic, socially exploratory novels, including McTeague and Vandover and the Brute. discussion guide (PDF)

Program 6 John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath Told through the story of one Oklahoma farm family, Steinbeck’s controversial, Pulitzer-prize-winning masterpiece captures America during an extraordinary moment in our history: The Great Depression. The Grapes of Wrath is regarded as one of the greatest and most socially significant novels of the twentieth century, intensely human, yet majestic in scale and moral vision. A California native educated at Stanford University, Steinbeck was also the only California writer ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. discussion guide (PDF)

Program 7 Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust Standing out among the many chroniclers of the strange, rootless, fantasy-based life of 1930s Los Angeles—the heyday both of midwestern immigration and Hollywood glamour-West contrives here a fictional vehicle that captures the emptiness and confusion of the uprooted newcomers, and the “bad craziness” (to use Hunter S. Thompson’s term) of the world they moved into, and helped to create with their desperate acts of faith. discussion guide (PDF)

Program 8 Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely Chandler created the archetypal, wise-cracking, hard-boiled, private detective in Philip Marlowe, protagonist here and in many other Chandler novels. Here, in what is arguably Chandler’s best, Marlowe deals with Los Angeles’s gambling circuit, a murder, and three very beautiful but potentially deadly women. The continually twisting plot, which involves a stolen jade necklace, various drugs, a brutal ex-convict searching for his old flame, and a surprising final revelation, is in the end less important than Chandler’s indictment of a careless and dishonest society, and his vivid portrait of Los Angeles in the years preceding World War II. discussion guide (PDF)

Program 9 Jack Kerouac, On the Road This diary of a cross-country, bohemian odyssey is considered the anthem of the Beat movement, and the most famous of all of Kerouac’s works. Thinly disguised autobiography, it is filled with a cast of Kerouac’s real-life friends, lovers, and fellow travelers. A defense of impulsive living, existential protest and spiritual quest, On the Road has penetrated into the deepest levels of American thought and culture, and influenced many writers and artists since its publication in 1957. discussion guide (PDF)

Program 10 Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem Didion’s collection of twenty essays about California culture in the mid-1960s is a fractured, highly personal, yet classic evocation of the lives of “some dreamers of the golden dream.” It is also a prime example of the “New Journalism” style popular at the time that combined memoir and reportage, another of whose proponents was Tom Wolfe. discussion guide (PDF)

Program 11 Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts In this pungent, beautifully written, highly acclaimed memoir, Maxine Hong Kingston, a first-generation Chinese-American, recounts her childhood struggle to reconcile and understand her dual identities, and the two very different sets of rules she encounters every day in the “solid America” of her birth and the China of her mother’s “talking stories.” discussion guide (PDF)

Program 12 Jose Antonio Villareal, Pocho With remarkable language and memorable characters, this Depression-era story set in a working class barrio of suburban San Jose, California, describes a young Chicano’s coming-of-age and search for identity. The young man is torn between his loyalty to his immigrant family’s Mexican traditions and his attraction to the new, exciting life offered by his gang-oriented peers. discussion guide (PDF)

Program 13 Anna Deavere Smith, Twilight—Los Angeles, 1992: On the Road, A Search for American Character As in her previous projects, Deavere Smith combines here a number of genres: drama, journalism, reportage, performance art, and ethnography to create a stunning work of “documentary theatre.” She explores the devastating human impact of the Los Angeles riots, which she recounts verbatim in the words of people who experienced them. discussion guide (PDF)

 

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