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Americans and the California Dream #5
The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s
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 of the 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, 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 the other 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 changed his 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 Hollywood celebrities 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 prominent European film actors and artists and the creative 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 their European 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 important achievement 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 ways the most far-reaching and important of Starr's California books.
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 the other 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 changed his 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 Hollywood celebrities 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 prominent European film actors and artists and the creative 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 their European 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 important achievement 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 ways the most far-reaching and important of Starr's California books.
496 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1996
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235 people want to read
About the author
Kevin Starr
78 books68 followersKevin Starr was an American historian, best-known for his multi-volume series on the history of California, collectively called "America and the California Dream".
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 7, 2024
Kevin Starr is my favorite California historian and his work has long been an important resource for me in my own writing about the state. In The Dream Endures he takes another deep dive into the complexities of the California experience, this time into the social and cultural history of the 1930s. As in his other books about California, the range of reference here is nothing short of amazing, all of it woven together into one smooth, easy-reading narrative. The Dream Endures is yet another spellbinding part of Starr’s amazing “Americans and the California Dream” series (part 5), and takes the reader on yet another trip well worth the taking.
January 18, 2011
This book functions more or less as an addendum to the main body of Starr's multi-volume epic of California's history. It outlines the cultural and artistic achievement of the state, leading up to the Second World War, and is particularly focused on three areas in which California achieved preeminence: astronomy, photography, and cinema. Of particular interest is the chapter devoted to the social conditions of San Francisco between the Wars, into which Starr un-ostentatiously slips in the history of his own family.
May 21, 2012
As I continue through this series I am struck by California's reflection of the American Zeitgeist. This book is a corollary to the previous book which describes the trials and tribulations of a depression torn state. This book shows how California was able to move forward and set itself up to become the economic power it would become starting in WWII and beyond. Since Mr. Starr is very detailed in his retrospective some parts of the book are slow going. However, any reading of this series will prove eye-opening to anyone who enjoys history.
September 28, 2008
Should be required reading for every Californian (and for those who love the state). See Starr's other works in this series.
May 11, 2010
History meets People magazine, along with Architect Digest,
Sky and Telescope, TMZ and a variety of others, interesting
reading, something for everyone.
Author Starr's chapters mostly stand on their own, that is if you
aren't up to reading the whole book, you can pick a subject and
get most the story. This is because Starr tends to begin each
subject from scratch, sure it's a book about the 1930s, but every
historian loves a setup and in this case they all start around 4 BC.
You're 15 pages into a 30 page chapter and you realize you
just got to the 1930s. Still, it is good info though.
Goodreaders would especially like the chapters on Hollywood battling
the Depression and the California minimalist novel- 'Postman
Always Rings Twice'- 'Maltese Falcon' genre. An all-star list of
American and immigrant writers flocked to LA, many for the movies,
but a few for other reasons.
California and Pasadena particularly were a hub of astronomy, which
is where all the latest & greatest telescopes/observatories were
constructed. Astronomers Hale, Hubble, then along comes Einstein with
teaching visits at Cal Tech. A lot of names you know but don't know
exactly why are mentioned.
One of those bits of sports trivia you pick up- though small and on a
tight budget, San Francisco college St. Mary's shrewdly makes themselves
a national football power. Ahh the good old days, when it was only
academics.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews